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AMERICAN STATESMEN 

EDITED BY 

JOHN T. MORSE, JR. 

IN THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES 

VOL. XXVIII. 



THE CIVIL WAR 
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 



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SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 



BY 



ALBERT BUSHNELL HART 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
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COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART 

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TO 

ALBERT GAILLARD HART 

ABOLITIONIST 

UNDERGROUND-RAILROAD CONDUCTOR 

LIBERTY MAN, UNION SOLDIER 



PEEFACE 

The biographies of most of the American states- 
men of the Civil War have been written by their 
contemporaries, who could supplement research by 
their own impressions and recollections. The work 
of preparing this volume and estimating the char- 
acter and services of Salmon Portland Chase falls 
to one who never saw him ; but though dependent 
upon written and printed materials and the remi- 
niscences of others, I may perhaps claim some 
special interest in him as an exponent of that 
Western political anti-slavery movement which 
early stirred my blood through both heredity and 
training. 

The life of Mr. Chase has already been told in 
three published biographies. J. T. Trowbridge's 
"The Ferry Boy and the Financier," although 
founded on valuable data furnished by Chase him- 
self, is a romantic tale and really intended as a 
campaign document. R. B. Warden's long and 
elaborate " Life of Salmon P. Chase " is uncritical 
and unsatisfactory, and the mass of material which 
he had at his disposal was used neither with per- 
sonal discrimination nor literary judgment. The 



viii PREFACE 

third and best biography, by J. W. Schuckers, is 
written with historical perspective, but lacks the 
advantage of many valuable documents which have 
come to light in the twenty-five years following the 
death of Mr. Chase. 

Perhaps, therefore, there is room for another 
briefer biography, in which Warden's and Schuck- 
ers's works may be used as collections of material, 
partly accessible in no other form, but of which the 
chief sources shall be three collections of manu- 
scripts. The first is a file of letters to Chase, about 
eight thousand in number, running from 1824 to 
1873, for the use of which I am indebted to the 
kind permission of Mr. Chase's daughters, Mrs. 
Kate Chase and Mrs. W. S. Hoyt, and to the cour- 
tesy of Mr. James Ford Rhodes, who recovered 
them from their place of deposit. The second col- 
lection, which came to me through the late Mr. 
C. S. Hamlin of Williamsburg, Virginia, includes 
most of Chase's original diaries, letter-books, and 
memoranda, together with three autobiographical 
sketches, written, dictated, or inspired by him at 
various times. The third set is a considerable body 
of Mr. Chase's own unpublished letters, kindly lent 
by many persons, but especially by Major Dwight 
Bannister of Ottumwa, Iowa, and the late Mr. 
Edward L. Pierce of Milton, Massachusetts, who 
also placed at my disposal the letters of Chase to 
Charles Sumner. 



PREFACE ix 

Besides this mass of contemporary material, pro- 
fessional, personal, and political, I have freely- 
drawn on the few publications of Chase, on the 
debates and reports of Congress, and on the works 
of his fellow statesmen and their biographers. To 
Mr. Charles E. Ozanne I am much indebted for 
his patient and discriminating labor in deciphering 
and analyzing the diaries and letters of Chase. 
Professor James Bradley Thayer and Professor 
Charles F. Dunbar have done me the great kind- 
ness to read some of the proofs, and to make some 
suggestions on the chapters relative to finance and 
the constitutional decisions. 

It is not the purpose of this volume to give a 
detailed account of Mr. Chase's private life, nor 
even to describe fully his long, eventful, and varied 
public career, but rather to present him as the 
central figure in three episodes which are of great 
historic importance, — the Western political anti- 
slavery movement, the financial measures of the 
Civil War, and the process of judicial reconstruc- 
tion. The biography is therefore intended to be a 
brief history of these three epochs as seen through 
the activity of the anti-slavery leader, the financier, 
and the jurist. 

ALBERT BUSHNELL HART. 

Cambridge, April 1, 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE. 

I. Early Life 1 

II. The Western Lawyer 13 

III. Anti-Slavery in Ohio 28 

IV. The Political Abolitionist .... 54 
V. The Anti-Slavery Senator .... 103 

VI. The Republican Governor .... 149 

VII. The Election of 1860 178 

VHI. The Critical Year 1861 197 

IX. Taxation, Loans, and Legal Tenders, 1862-63 230 

X. Slavery in the Civil War 253 

XI. National Banks and the Gold Question . 274 

XII. Chase and Lincoln ...... 290 

XLIL The Judicial Problem of Reconstruction . 319 

XIV. The Second Stage of Reconstruction . . 357 

XV. Financial and Legal Tender Decisions . 384 

XVI. The Man 415 

Index 439 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Salmon P. Chase Frontispiece 

From a photograph by Daniel Bendann, Baltimore, 
Md. 

Autograph from the Chamberlain collection, Boston 
Public Library. 

The vignette of " Edgewood, " Mr. Chase's home, near 
Washington, D. C, is from a photograph. Pa g e 

Joshua R. Glddings facing 84 

From a photograph in the possession of Mr. Francis J. 
Garrison, Boston, 

Autograph from a MS. in the Library of the Boston 
Athenaeum. 

Facsimile of Salmon P. Chase's Handwriting facing 124 
Letter written from Washington, D. C, March 7, 1850, 
to Charles Sumner. From the original in the Library of 
Harvard University. 

John Sherman facing 194 

From a photograph by B. M. Clinedinst, Washington, 
D. C. 

Autograph from the Brady Register, owned by Bra- 
dy's nephew, Mr. Levin C. Handy, Washington, D. C. 

William P. Fessenden facing 318 

From a photograph by Brady in the Library of the 
State Department at Washington. 

Autograph from the Chamberlain collection, Boston 
Public Library. 



SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 



CHAPTER I 

EAKLY LIFE 

In the course of the sixty-five years of his life, 
from 1808 to 1873, the lot of Salmon Portland 
Chase was cast in many places. In his boyhood 
his family lived successively in two towns in New 
Hampshire, and he went to school and college in 
three others ; as a lad he lived in Ohio, first in a 
village and then in a city ; his earliest manhood 
and much of his senatorial term he spent in Wash- 
ington ; his professional years, in Cincinnati ; his 
four years' service as governor, in Columbus ; and 
during the last twelve years of his life he had his 
permanent home in or near Washington. 

Few American public men have had so multi- 
farious an experience, and few illustrate so many 
types of national character. Chase was endowed 
with a New England tradition of learning and 
statesmanship, a Western knowledge of the power 
of organization, and a national insight into the 
meaning of the American system of government. 
His abilities, courage, and good fortune gave him 



2 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

many opportunities to show his powers : as leader 
of the political abolitionists of Ohio from 1841 to 
1849, as Ohio senator from 1849 to 1855, as gov- 
ernor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860, as secretary of 
the treasury from 1861 to 1864, and as chief justice 
of the United States from 1864 to 1873, he moved 
in the midst of great events, which he helped to 
make and to modify. 

The Chase family was of the purest American 
stock. In 1660 Aquila Chase, an Englishman, 
came to Newbury, Massachusetts, and there built 
and commanded a ship. He left a son Moses, 
from whom sprang Daniel; and from Daniel, 
Samuel, who married Mary Dudley. Their son 
Dudley emigrated in 1763 from Sutton, Massa- 
chusetts, with his wife, Alice Corbett, and seven 
children, to the wilds of the upper Connecticut, 
and helped to found the new town of Cornish, 
named by the Chases for the English town or 
county from which their ancestors sprang. From 
the loins of Dudley sprang nine stout sons, of 
whom Ithamar, born in 1763, married Janet Rals- 
ton, daughter of a Scotch settler of Keene, and on 
January 13, 1808, became the father of Salmon 
Portland Chase. 

Few families have given to their communities 
such a proportion of energetic leaders. Chase's 
father, Ithamar, was a man of substance, a farmer 
and small manufacturer, for years a stout Feder- 
alist and member of the governor's council. The 
most noted of the kindred were uncle Dudley, twice 






EARLY LIFE 3 

a United States senator, and uncle Philander, one 
of the most striking figures in the development of 
the West. The boy, Salmon, was heir to a noble 
tradition of learning, of public spirit, and of use- 
fulness. Chase's birthplace, in what one of his 
friends once called " hill-ridden New Hampshire," 
lies in the last roll of the mountain billows which 
sweep from Monadnock and Kearsage down west- 
ward to the fertile river bottoms of the Connecti- 
cut. From these hill and valley towns have sprung 
numerous rugged men of affairs, who have made 
their fortunes in other States; and near by was 
Dartmouth College, nursery of many great men, 
and among them of Daniel Webster, with whom 
Chase once touched elbows for a few weeks in the 
Senate. 

About 1816 his father removed to Keene, New 
Hampshire ; but when the boy was nine years old 
the father died, leaving to his widow a slender pro- 
perty and ten children, the oldest of whom was a 
son of twenty-five years. The boy's education had 
already begun in 1816 : a dame school ; a district 
school in Keene ; a better school in Windsor, Ver- 
mont, where he began Latin, a language which he 
always liked to quote ; a tutor in Keene, with whom 
he began Greek, — under such training passed the 
years till 1820. At this time an influence came in 
which probably determined Chase's career : Uncle 
Philander appeared as the good genius of the fam- 
ily and took the boy out to his Ohio frontier bish- 
opric " in partibus" Later generations know a 



4 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

great deal about the ruder side of the religious 
development of the West, — about camp-meetings 
and Peter Cartwright ; they do not remember the 
gentle, more refined, yet upbuilding work of Bishop 
Chase and his coadjutors. He was poor as Jean 
Valjean's bishop, so that he almost envied a friend 
his " good fat living of $1000 a year as clerk in the 
Navy Department ; " he had an official ecclesiasti- 
cal income which did not pay his postage ; yet he 
was a man who knew how to unite the secular with 
the religious, to carry on farms and mills side by 
side with his school and his churches. 

In the bishop's school at Worthington, near 
Columbus, the boy simultaneously did farm work 
and studied Greek. Two years passed in monoto- 
nous life, for which the boy had no love. In 1822 
Bishop Chase was appointed president of Cincin- 
nati College. Evidently the requirements of Cin- 
cinnati College were not exacting, for the fifteen- 
year-old lad quickly became a sophomore. The 
bishop's new activity, however, gave him so little 
satisfaction that he resigned at the end of a year, 
and young Chase returned to his New England 
home in Keene. He never expressed any enthusi- 
asm over his boyhood experience in the West, and 
the only important direct effect from it that can be 
traced is that it probably led him later to settle in 
Ohio. 

On his return to New Hampshire, at sixteen 
years of age, the boy forthwith became a man, for 
he began to support himself, at least in part. One 



EARLY LIFE 5 

of many children, and much away from home, Chase 
felt his mother's influence less than most boys ; 
but her shrewd and affectionate character is re- 
vealed in some letters of the period written to him. 
She struggled hard to get her children started in 
life, and in 1824 put Salmon into Dartmouth Col- 
lege. Entering as junior, he taught in country 
schools during the long winter vacations, and in 
1826 he was graduated. 

Dartmouth College was a wholesome school, in 
which young men studied a little classics, mathe- 
matics, and belles-lettres, and got good from each 
other and from the characters of their instructors. 
A fellow collegian of Chase said of it in 1826 : 
" We meddled little with the history, government, 
or politics of our country ; I think not enough to 
prepare us for the active side of life." Certainly 
none of Chase's college teachers seem to have im- 
pressed him, and of President Tyler there is not a 
mention in his reminiscences. Chase was only a 
moderate student and took no high rank in college. 
Of his private reading, the " Mysteries of Udolpho " 
was all that stood in his memory in after life. On 
the whole, his intellectual advantages were unusual 
for that time, and in the end he got an excellent 
education, though it came chiefly from men and 
books after he had left college ; at least, throughout 
his life he had the enjoyment of academic brother- 
hood with men everywhere who had been stamped 
with the same collegiate training as his own. 

The next step in his life was of especial conse- 



6 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

quence, for it was to make a cultivated man of the 
world out of the country boy. When he graduated 
he had already made up his mind to study law; 
but he could no longer accept his mother's sacri- 
fices, and the readiest way to earn his living for the 
time was to teach school. Uncle Philander, like a 
genius of the lamp, appeared at the right moment 
to give him guidance and letters of introduction ; 
and Chase went to Washington. There he had no 
better resource than to announce " a select classical 
school," for which but one pupil was entered. In 
discouragement he applied to his uncle, Senator 
Dudley Chase, to get him a government clerkship, 
and received a warning never to enter government 
service, with the offer of "fifty cents to buy a 
spade." The good bishop's letters were more ser- 
viceable, however, for through his influence Chase 
became the proprietor of an established boys' school, 
and for three years he was a schoolmaster. 

By this time some of the habits of Chase's life 
were forming: fondness for good company; love 
of reading; a habit of letter-writing; interest in 
affairs; a share in the financial burdens of his 
family; acquaintance with public men; and the 
keeping of a diary. He even spoke to some friends 
of "a wonderful vision of meeting in the halls 
of legislation." Chase's later life was distinctly 
serious, for he was then absorbed in the moral side 
of existence, and in the hard, practical work of so- 
cial and political organization. These three years 
in Washington, however, have an altogether differ- 



EARLY LIFE 7 

ent tone ; the young man's writings are light and 
almost frivolous. Perhaps the episode of Parisian 
gayety in a Puritan life was chiefly due to the 
family of Chase's patron, nominal preceptor, and 
friend, William Wirt of Virginia, attorney-general 
of the United States. In Wirt's family were sev- 
eral lively daughters, whose Southern archness and 
banter were very agreeable to the young Yankee. 
In praise of two of them he published a poem, 
which was no worse than the stock material of the 
annuals of the day, and closed with fashionable 
gloom : — 

" Even so — 
I thought, and with the thought a heavy sigh 
Came from my inmost heart — must fade away 
All that the earth of the beautiful inherits, 
And so must these bright creatures pass from earth." 

In the warmth of this delightful family, this 
"pure and gentle and refined and cultivated cir- 
cle," the young man basked, and it was a keen 
disappointment to him when they left Washington 
in 1829, at the end of Wirt's term of office. All his 
life long he remembered Mr. Wirt, " one of the 
handsomest men and one of the completest gentle- 
men of his time ; " and in the furious debates of 
1854 in the Senate, Chase paid him a tribute as a 
type of the lovable slaveholder. 

Through the Wirts, his uncle Dudley, and Henry 
Clay, Chase entered into the pleasant society of the 
national capital. The town was still raw, ugly, 
and unclean ; but it was a period of much refined 



8 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

hospitality, and he was welcomed by members of 
the cabinet and at presidential levees. Thus he 
went to Secretary Porter's, where, as he notes, 
Daniel Webster tossed off a full glass of whiskey, 
supposing it to be wine; and he was invited to 
" the scene of ceremonious frivolity at Mr. Clay's." 
The picture of Washington society thus drawn in 
a contemporary diary is on the whole pleasing, and 
makes one wish that Mrs. Trollope could have had 
access to the Wirt household. 

Chase's record of the political conditions of the 
time is interesting, and especially important be- 
cause it covers the transition period from Adams 
to Jackson, as seen by the young schoolmaster. 
An early entry in his diary, under the date of 
January 28, 1829, is as follows : — 

" As Mr. Adams was soon to go out of office, his 
last Drawing-room was numerously attended. . . . 
The whole avenue to the palace-door was filled with 
carriages of those who had arrived before us, and 
we had only the meagre satisfaction of not being 
the last of the train. Nearly fifteen minutes 
elapsed before we were able to reach the door. 
At length we were set at liberty and entered the 
house. An immense crowd was present. Three 
rooms were full of guests. Music was heard in the 
great, and yet unfurnished, East-Koom, inviting the 
dancers to engage in the cotillion. Many accepted 
the invitation, and soon many light feet were trip- 
ping over the floor. At ten o'clock, the dance 
broke off, and the supper room was thrown open. 



EARLY LIFE 9 

Long tables were spread in a spacious apartment, 
covered with everything that could please the eye or 
gratify the taste. They were soon surrounded by 
a crowd by no means reluctant to disburden them 
of their load. As each company was satisfied and 
departed, others filled the vacant places, and the 
banquet did not end until after eleven o'clock. 
Then the dance was resumed for a little while, 
until, one by one, the gay group diminished, 
when the music played 'Home, Sweet Home,' as 
a finale, and the pleasures of the evening were 
ended." 

It was the fortune of the young observer, who 
was of course an Adams man, to see the first recep- 
tion of another President, and to be shocked at the 
uproar in the White House after the inauguration 
of Jackson. A few weeks later he notes that a 
" more savage spirit breathes in the administration, 
and as a natural consequence distrust has come in 
place of confidence." Of Jackson himself Chase 
wrote, " In his manners, he is graceful and agree- 
able, and much excels his predecessor in the art of 
winning golden opinions from all sorts of men." 
Van Buren, whom Chase was ardently to support 
for President in 1848, seemed to him, in 1829, 
"cold, selfish, base, and faithless. May he never," 
he exclaims, " reach the golden reward to which he 
so vehemently aspires." Chase notes the universal 
belief that Van Buren was really responsible for 
the policy of removals from office ; and he relates 
that one of his own acquaintance was informed by 



10 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Jackson that the President could not conscien- 
tiously remove an incumbent in order to make a 
place for the applicant. 

Chase's opinion of several other public men de- 
serves record. He thought it strange that John 
Kandolph was "allowed to exercise his fantastic 
humors in the House without check and almost 
without rebuke — an aristocrat at heart, and disor- 
dered in intellect, the scorn of the wise ; the laugh- 
ing-stock of the gay, and the abhorrence of the 
good." Calhoun was " an unfortunate politician, 
yet a very good man. Few men in our party are 
gifted with more splendid abilities — all that he 
does and utters and imagines is marked by his 
grand, characteristic, impetuous energy." When 
he heard Webster for the first time, in an argu- 
ment before the Supreme Court, he observed : 
" He states his case with great clearness, and 
draws his inferences with exceeding sagacity. His 
language is rich and copious ; his manner dignified 
and impressive ; his voice deep and sonorous ; and 
his sentiments high and often sublime. He argues 
generally from general principles, seldom descend- 
ing into minute analysis where intricacy is apt to 
embarrass and analogy to mislead. He is remark- 
able for strength rather than dexterity, and would 
easier rend an oak than untie a knot. If I could 
carry my faith in the possibility of all things to 
labor, so far as to suppose that any degree of 
industry would enable me to reach his height, how 
day and night should testify of my toils ! " 



EARLY LIFE 11 

While thus interested in political events and 
public men, young Chase was learning his own 
tastes and was taking in the social world about 
him. He listened to concerts and felt sure that he 
understood why he enjoyed them. He hobnobbed 
with artists. He visited the first completed two 
miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Kailroad, and 
mused on the new system, which " removes the 
Alleghanies," and "makes Cincinnati and Balti- 
more neighboring cities." Sometimes he indulged 
also in the natural dreams of a gifted youth. 
" Knowledge may yet be gained," he writes, " and 
golden reputation. I may yet enjoy the conscious- 
ness of having lived not in vain. Future scenes of 
triumph may be mine." 

Already the road to distinction had been chosen, 
for in 1827 he began to study law, ostensibly as a 
student of William Wirt, but really as a neglect- 
ful private reader. Neither his diary nor his later 
reminiscences conceal the fact that his law studies 
were scanty, and that his preceptor Wirt had asked 
him only one question in the two years of their 
relation. Indeed, Chase frankly admits that " very 
seldom had any candidate for admission to the bar 
presented himself with a slenderer stock of learn- 
ing ; " and after the ordeal was over he lamented 
that the cramming process " had given strength to a 
habit of superficial reading." When he presented 
himself for admission to the bar, kindly Justice 
Cranch demurred, either at the weakness of the 
preparation or at the shortness of the time of 



12 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

study ; but he gave way, and thus, on December 
14, 1829, Chase became a lawyer. 

With his admission to the bar closed the first 
period of Chase's life. In twenty-two years he had 
developed a handsome though still awkward per- 
son, an observant mind, a habit of reflection, and 
a clear though still somewhat artificial style. In 
this formative period are seen already the founda- 
tions of the strong and versatile character of the 
later man. He worked hard, if spasmodically ; he 
read a little ; he showed perseverance, address, and 
devotion to principle; he held himself well in hand; 
and his most intimate correspondence shows him 
to have been upright without priggishness. He 
had had opportunities of education and culture 
such as came to few young men of that period ; he 
had been among men who could impress his char- 
acter. Out of it all he had brought a wholesome 
sense of his own deficiencies, expressed in somewhat 
exaggerated self-examination in the closing entry of 
his diary for 1829. "I am almost twenty-two, and 
have, as yet, attained but the threshold of know- 
ledge. I have formed few settled opinions, and 
have examined but few subjects. The night has 
seldom found me much advanced beyond the sta- 
tion I occupied in the morning, and the end of the 
year has at length come round and finds me almost 
in the very spot I was in at its commencement. I 
have learned little, and have forgotten much, and, 
really, to conclude of the future from the past, I 
almost despair of making any figure in the world." 



CHAPTER II 

THE WESTERN LAWYER 

According to the statement of Chase himself, 
the argument which induced Justice Cranch to 
admit him to the bar was his declaration : " I have 
made all my arrangements to go to the Western 
country and practice law." As early as July, 1826, 
while he was still in college, a friend in Cincinnati 
wrote, advising him against a place where there 
were " about sixty lawyers, about thirty ministers, 
and doctors without number." In February, 1830, 
Judge Burnet, of Cincinnati, senator from Ohio, 
rather faintly counseled him to settle in Cincinnati, 
with the remark : " On the whole it offers to you 
stronger inducements than any other place in the 
West." With large expectations and a little money 
Chase left Washington in March, 1830, to make 
his fortune in the golden West. 

The choice of Cincinnati as the place for the 
development of a young and ill-trained lawyer was 
of course influenced by Chase's Ohio relatives and 
boyhood experiences, but he sought it chiefly be- 
cause he believed that it offered the largest oppor- 
tunity for brains and ambition. It was no longer 
a rude frontier town, but the largest city in the 



14 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

West, apparently destined to be the metropolis of 
the Mississippi Valley, on the axis of Eastern and 
Western commerce, and a terminus for important 
and growing trade from North to South. The 
Cumberland road to Wheeling and Zanesville and 
the road to Pittsburg across southern Pennsylvania 
were the great Western highways of the time ; and 
from Pittsburg and Wheeling navigation reached 
to Cincinnati, St. Louis, St. Paul, and New Or- 
leans. The Northwest was then an undeveloped 
section, far behind the Ohio River settlements. 

Of all the cities of the West the most individual 
and the most foreign was Cincinnati. On the con- 
tracted plain above the high-water mark lay the 
business district ; the rest of the city and suburbs 
straggled up over the confused hills, everywhere 
flanked by walls of squared limestone. Among the 
twenty-five thousand people of Cincinnati in 1830 
were to be found four different elements, which 
were slowly and unwillingly combining in a com- 
mon life : the Southerner, the New Englander and 
Middle State man, the foreigner, and the negro. 
The Southern element was on the whole the most 
numerous, for all the lower counties of Ohio, Indi- 
ana, and Illinois had a large number of Southern 
settlers, and in Cincinnati itself there were many 
people of distinctly Southern habits of mind. In- 
deed, in many respects Cincinnati was a Southern 
city on free soil: the Southern buyer gladdened 
the heart of the merchant ; the Southern traveler 
and his family took the best rooms in the hotels ; 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 15 

and in times of crisis Southern sympathy for slavery 
was visible in the newspapers. New Englanders 
were numerous and contended for their familiar 
standards of education and intellectual life ; but 
they were not here, as in northern Ohio, the domi- 
nant element. Foreigners had begun to straggle 
in ; and Cincinnati became an early place of set- 
tlement for Germans, through whom, about 1825, 
the culture of the grape was introduced. The 
negro population was only about one fifteenth of 
the whole, but it was a source of some perplexities, 
for besides the influx of negroes from other North- 
ern communities, free to shift for themselves, there 
was an infusion of freed slaves from Kentucky, and 
even of runaways. 

Commercially Cincinnati was a place of growing 
importance. The artery which kept the city pro- 
sperous was the Ohio River, which in modern rail- 
way circles is said to be shallow and uncertain, but 
in 1830 was a natural street, for which pious trav- 
elers thanked the Almighty, even though a voyage 
from Pittsburg to Cincinnati might take a week. 
Besides having the direct river trade, Cincinnati 
was already becoming the centre of a rich coun- 
tryside, and the exchange point for Northern and 
Southern products. On the north, however, the 
means of communication were still so poor that 
even so late as 1839 a traveler leaving Cincinnati 
on Thursday reported that he arrived at Colum- 
bus, a hundred miles away, on Monday. Canals 
from Portsmouth to Cleveland and from Cincin- 



16 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

nati to Dayton were now almost completed; but 
not till the railroad came, in the early fifties, was 
Cincinnati really united to the shores of Lake Erie. 
Toward the south, however, it was otherwise. The 
navigable branches of the Ohio — the Kanawha, 
Licking, Kentucky, Cumberland, and Tennessee — 
gave access to Kentucky and the country farther 
south; and Cincinnati was already becoming a 
favorite supply point for provisions, especially for 
hog products. There was also some manufactur- 
ing, — in cotton, lumber, and machinery, — which 
cheap coal was later to develop. 

The social life of Cincinnati has been much mis- 
represented by Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Man- 
ners of the Americans. " However accurately that 
author described the life which she saw, the dia- 
ries and letters of Chase, then living in the city, 
show that there was much which she did not see. 
To the mind of the cultivated Englishwoman, dirty 
streets, tobacco chewing, and the coarseness of a 
frontier town seemed incompatible with refined 
society ; but such a society there was, and Chase 
at once found a share in it. In a few months he 
was the welcome friend of the Burnets and the 
Longworths, the social leaders in the city. 

The first duty of the newcomer was to establish 
himself in his profession, and within four years and 
a half he had taken his place as one of the best 
and busiest lawyers in Cincinnati. During the 
first two years, however, progress was very slow. 
He was admitted to the Ohio bar in June, 1830, 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 17 

and in September set up his own office. He after- 
ward said that his first client paid him half a 
dollar for drawing a deed, and the second client 
borrowed the half dollar and decamped. 

It is a proof of the strength of character of the 
young man that this period of growth into his pro- 
fession is also the period of greatest intellectual 
progress in his whole life : he read, he reflected, he 
analyzed, he pondered upon religion, he lectured, 
he wrote articles, he projected a literary magazine, 
and he began the only formal publication of his 
whole career. Chase was throughout his life a 
great reader, though in a rather haphazard fashion. 
But to read and reflect was not enough for the 
active young man ; hence in the fall of 1830 he 
took a large part in founding the Cincinnati Ly- 
ceum, a system of popular lectures much like that 
of the modern "Institutes" in the great cities, to 
which he proposed to add the illustration of sci- 
entific discoveries by simple experiments ; but only 
that part of the scheme which provided for lectures 
was carried out. 

Of these lectures, Chase himself delivered four ; 
and he was thus led directly to his first literary 
venture, the publication in the " North American 
Review" of two of his lectures, "The Life and 
Character of Henry Brougham" (July, 1831), and 
"Effects of Machinery" (January, 1832). The 
impulse to this latter article appears in an entry in 
his diary of March 2, 1831 : " Perused an article 
in the Ed. Rev. on the effects of Machinery and 



18 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

accumulation and about 50 pages of the Wealth 
of Nations and about a dozen pages of Say." The 
article is a good wholesome statement of the ortho- 
dox doctrine of the real advance resulting from 
machinery, with a special statement of those Ameri- 
can conditions which take away the force of the 
argument against factory towns. "Machinery," 
says Chase, " substitutes bodies of iron with souls 
of steam to do the work of living men." 

From contributor to editor was a step which 
Chase longed to take, and in 1832 he was busily 
writing to his friends in behalf of a scheme for 
a "Western Quarterly Review." The plan was 
heroic, in a region where there were almost no book- 
sellers, but it was not unexampled. Timothy Flint 
had for a year or two been issuing his " Western 
Monthly Review," and James Hall at Vandalia 
was editing an " Illinois Magazine and Western 
Souvenir." Some effort was made to consolidate 
these ventures, but the project lacked support, and 
the only result seems to have been that Hall gave 
the name of " Western Monthly Magazine " to his 
periodical in its later form of 1833-36. 

The only literary careers in the thirties in which 
a man could make a living in the West were 
journalism and the writing of law books. For 
newspaper work Chase had some early inclination, 
and to some of the local papers he occasionally 
sent short unsigned articles or editorials. Law 
books, however, came more directly in the line of 
his profession ; hence in September, 1832, he 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 19 

formed the project of publishing a collection of the 
laws of Ohio, for the use of lawyers and courts. 
The state judges took an interest in the plan, and 
lent him their aid ; and he reprinted in his three 
volumes all the public acts in the four volumes of 
"adopted laws" for the Northwest Territory, the 
four volumes of territorial enactments, and the 
thirty-one volumes of state laws. He added abun- 
dant notes and references, and his " Laws " at once 
became the standard edition. Unfortunately, the 
legislature would buy only a hundred and fifty 
copies, and Chase's rewards were probably not over 
a thousand dollars for his immense labor ; but the 
work at once gave him a solid reputation through- 
out the West. Chancellor Kent and Justice Story, 
in personal letters of much warmth, testified to its 
value and its learning. 

From the beginning it had been Chase's intention 
to prefix to the " Laws " a brief historical sketch 
of Ohio, and the resulting forty pages remain one 
of the best accounts of the early constitutional 
history of the Northwest Territory and of the com- 
monwealth of Ohio. The historical matter is 
sound ; there are references to some sources, and a 
successful effort to choose the really interesting and 
significant events. The Ordinance of 1787 had 
already been the subject of a long disquisition in 
Chase's diary, in July, 1831, and his careful dis- 
cussion of it in his historical sketch did much to 
call attention to its historical importance. The 
history is a plain, straightforward story, with little 



\ 



20 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

comment, for the editor avoided political and con- 
troversial questions ; hence the book gives little 
indication of Chase's opinions. One of the few 
subjects on which the future governor of Ohio 
takes ground, however, is the administration of St. 
Clair in the Northwest, which afforded him oppor- 
tunity for expressing his satisfaction that " the veto 
power, that anomaly in republican government, is 
not recognized by the Constitution of the State of 
Ohio." As a whole, the history shows Chase full 
of the spirit of historical investigation, and pos- 
sessed of an unusual power of statement. He had 
the qualities of a good historian, — truth, patience, 
accuracy, impartiality, discernment, an interesting 
method, and a readable style. 

Soon after the publication of the Ohio statutes, 
Chase married. The frank diary of a susceptible 
young man of twenty-two is certain to record much 
to vex the same man at forty and to amuse him at 
sixty. Chase was fond of the ladies, and liked to 
call on them and to tell his diary what he thought 
of them. A frequently recurring name is that of 
Catherine Jane Garniss, a young lady about three 
years Chase's junior. After a leisurely courtship 
they were married, March 4, 1834 ; on December 1, 
1835, she died, leaving him a little girl, who lived 
only four years longer. To the very end of his life 
the statesman recalled with tenderness this wife of 
his youth, who seemed so well suited to be his help- 
meet. The desolation of the young father inten- 
sified a strong religious feeling, to which he gave 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 21 

frequent expression in public and in his diary : the 
Puritan habit of withdrawal and meditation awoke 
in him; he constantly reviewed his own life, up- 
braided his few failings, and set himself forward 
in a new effort. Sincerity and uprightness speak 
out from the anguish of these months. 

Four years later, September 26, 1839, Chase 
married his second wife, Eliza Ann Smith, of Cin- 
cinnati, then a girl of eighteen. Of the three chil- 
dren whom she bore to him, his daughter Kate 
(later Mrs. Sprague) was the only one who lived ; 
and Mrs. Chase was taken from him September 
29, 1845. She was a refined woman, who had 
much influence in moderating in her husband a 
tendency to harshness and aggressiveness ; but it 
is evident that she had little connection with the 
exciting professional and political career in which 
Chase was busied during their whole married life. 

A third marriage took place November 6, 1846, 
with Sarah Bella Dunlop Ludlow. This connec- 
tion was in many respects different from the others. 
In the first place, Miss Ludlow belonged to one of 
the best-known families in Cincinnati, her grand- 
father, Israel Ludlow, having been one of the 
founders of the city ; by the marriage of his wife's 
sister to Kandall Hunt, of New Orleans, Chase 
gained a useful insight into Southern conditions ; 
and his wife brought some property with her. Mrs. 
Chase was a woman of much dignity and force of 
character, showing a beautiful tenderness toward 
her husband, and sharing in his public life, though 



1 



22 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

much of the time too ill to go about with him. She 
also brought him into close relations with her own 
anti-slavery family, and especially with her uncle 
by marriage, John McLean, later an associate jus- 
tice of the United States Supreme Court. Two 
children were born to them, of whom the only one 
that lived was Jeanette Kalston (later Mrs. Hoyt). 
On June 13, 1852, Chase was again bereft of his 
wife, having thus in seventeen years stood at the 
biers of three wives and five children ; thencefor- 
ward he lived a widower to the end. 

While the sorrows of life thus descended upon 
Chase, his professional reputation steadily in- 
creased. In April, 1832, he was received into part- 
nership on equal terms by General Edward King, 
and Timothy Walker, afterward author of the well- 
known "American Law." Seven months later 
Chase entered into a partnership with D. J. Cas- 
well, the importance of which lay in the fact that 
Caswell was solicitor for the Cincinnati agency of 
the Bank of the United States, and divided this 
valuable employment with Chase. In July, 1834, 
he withdrew from Caswell, retaining the business 
of the Bank of the United States on his own ac- 
count ; and in November he was made the solicitor 
of the Lafayette Bank. These important trusts 
gave him so lucrative a practice that his literary 
pursuits were gradually thrust into the background, 
and finally ceased. 

The estimates of Chase as a lawyer differ widely : 
to enthusiastic anti-slavery men he was a great 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 23 

lawyer because lie made out so plausible a con- 
stitutional argument on their side ; to the practi- 
tioner he seemed a very able and effective attorney, 
but by no means at the head of the Ohio bar. He 
prepared his cases with great care, sometimes mak- 
ing briefs on both his own and his opponent's side. 
Once in court, he made an impression by the force 
of his clear statement, but not by any impassioned 
appeal ; in fact, he is said to have broken down on 
his first important argument ; and he never had 
the art of winning over a reluctant jury. His 
learning was not great in this period of his life, 
and he depended on luminous principles rather 
than on authorities. As one of his friends puts it, 
" Chase was not a great lawyer, but a great man 
who had a knowledge of law." 

To carry on his multifarious practice, Chase 
early felt the need of a partner who should take 
office work and detail. He first associated himself 
with Samuel Eels, in the firm of Chase & Eels ; but 
in 1838 they separated, and Chase took up Flamen 
Ball, a man who had failed in business, had then 
studied law in Chase's office, and was now made 
a partner. As Chase from this time on was much 
away from home on legal or political business, Ball 
took most of the office work, for which he had 
some talent ; but he was much inferior to Chase 
in abilities, character, and habits, and at times was 
very neglectful of the firm's business. In 1848, 
when Chase went to Washington, Horace Wells 
was taken into the new firm of Chase, Ball & 



24 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Wells; in February, 1849, George Hoadly was 
made a partner, under the firm name of Chase, 
Ball & Hoadly. 

From about 1834, when Chase had gained a repu- 
tation as a lawyer, he always had in his office one or 
more law students. At that period law schools were 
few and feeble, and the approved method of legal 
education was to go into a lawyer's office, do his 
drudgery, read his books, and pick up crumbs of 
his wisdom. To Chase, however, the relation was 
much more serious than that of teacher to pupil, 
or of man of affairs to an unpaid employee : he 
felt a genuine interest in these able young men, 
cultivated their friendship, impressed them with 
his strong personality, and sent them out into the 
world to be good lawyers, — and to be "Chase men." 
Nothing more plainly speaks the real sanity and 
strength of Chase's character than the later success 
of many of these men in law and in public life. 
Among them were George Pugh, supporter of 
Chase for the Senate in 1849, and in 1855 his 
political rival and the successor to his seat ; Stan- 
ley Matthews, Chase's confidential agent in the 
legislature of 1849, later senator from Ohio and 
justice of the United States Supreme Court ; Wil- 
liam M. Groesbeck, member of Congress from Ohio 
in 1857-59 ; Chase's nephew, Ealston Skinner, an 
officer in the Civil War ; Edward L. Pierce, of 
Massachusetts, a strong anti-slavery man, and an 
official of the Treasury Department under Chase's 
secretaryship, later the biographer of Charles 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 25 

Sumner; James Monroe, an Oberlin abolitionist, 
later sent as consul to Rio by Chase's influence, and 
afterward member of Congress ; George Hoadly, 
judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, governor of 
Ohio, and the most eminent lawyer who ever came 
under Chase's influence; Jacob D. Cox, lawyer, 
historian, governor of Ohio, and Secretary of the 
Interior. 

It was a fine thing to be patron and inciter to 
such spirits, but there was another side to this 
relation : with genuine love for his young friends, 
Chase expected that they would some day recipro- 
cate his kindness, and he felt entitled to lay out 
for them a political future which would contribute 
to his own advancement. The testimony of several 
of them is that they felt a pressure put upon them 
to subordinate their plans to Chase's judgment; 
a few of them broke loose from him and event- 
ually turned up on the other side of politics. 
Pierce wrote to him in 1856 : " I have been in 
company with prominent men more than the ma- 
jority of young men of my age, but at the same 
time have looked after my own independence, and 
avoided the appearance of being any one's para- 
site." Yet, though Chase's old students were some- 
times his opponents, they were never his enemies, 
and those who are now living still carry for him a 
feeling of warm, admiring gratitude. Upon his own 
political fortunes these relations with young men 
were not altogether happy, for his urgency lost 
him the cordial aid of some of the strongest of 



26 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

these friends, and hence at critical times he was 
compelled to rest upon weaker men, whose counsel 
was not always wise or disinterested. 

Chase's legal practice was chiefly commercial ; 
he did, it is true, assist the State to prosecute the 
murderer Gedney in 1836 ; but outside of the 
famous fugitive slave cases it was not his lot to be 
concerned in any great causes. His argument in 
the telegraph case of O'Reilly v. Morse, in 1853, 
is said to have persuaded Taney to alter the re- 
ceived doctrines of patent law; but the court after- 
wards returned to its former ground. 

The details of the business of Chase and Ball 
reveal a curious and interesting commercial system. 
All lawyers see the seamy side of life, but perhaps 
few knew so much as they of the intricacies of 
State banking, of the effects of " wild-cat " bank 
notes, of the difficulty of realizing on any real- 
estate collateral, of the devices to shore up the 
credit of despairing merchants, of the years neces- 
sary to straighten out the affairs of a debt-ridden 
estate. Few firms have less to fear from an exami- 
nation of their records ; in the recesses of his most 
intimate correspondence with his partner, Chase 
appears an upright man, an honest lawyer, and a 
faithful trustee. In 1841 Chase lost his valuable 
connection with the estate of the Bank of the United 
States, because his fees were considered too high, 
and the flood tide in the affairs of Chase and Ball 
seems to have been reached in 1845, when the firm's 
annual income was nearly ten thousand dollars. 



THE WESTERN LAWYER 27 

It was perhaps this familiarity with banks and 
banking which caused Chase himself to become a 
man of affairs. In December, 1845, he figured 
out his debts at about eleven thousand dollars, 
against which he had holdings of undivided real 
estate, partly his own, partly in trust for his chil- 
dren ; and with his good professional income and 
his rents he should speedily have cleared up his 
obligations. Instead, he held to his real estate, 
dribbling out taxes from year to year, and renew- 
ing his notes as they came due. At the end of 
twenty years of practice he had probably accumu- 
lated a net property of twenty thousand dollars, 
but he was still renewing his own paper. Had 
Chase cared to make corporation law the chief 
business of his life, he must have become rich, for 
he had the qualities of a great railroad lawyer and 
manager ; but he gradually took up two interests 
which withdrew him from his regular practice, and 
kept him a comfortably poor man, — he threw him- 
self into the unpopular anti-slavery movement, and 
he went into politics as the Ohio leader of the Lib- 
erty Party. 



CHAPTER III 

ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 

Many of the States of the Union include two 
communities of widely different origin, interests, 
and standards ; but even the upper and lower penin- 
sulas of Michigan are not more diverse now than 
were northern Ohio and southern Ohio in the two 
decades from 1830 to 1850. The reason was very 
simple : the two great arteries of travel from the 
seacoast to the Northwest were by the Potomac 
valley and over the highlands of southern Pennsyl- 
vania to the Ohio Eiver, and through the Mohawk 
valley and highlands of New York to Lake Erie. 
Over the southern road came settlers from the States 
of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, even North Caro- 
lina ; and immigrants through the ports of Balti- 
more, Alexandria, and Norfolk. By the northern 
route came New Englanders and their allies of cen- 
tral New York. Even the land grants were divided 
between North and South : to Connecticut fell the 
strip along the south side of Lake Erie, the so- 
called " Western Reserve " and " Eire Lands ; " to 
Virginia were left the Military Bounty Lands in 
southern-central Ohio. The State was also the 
shortest bridge between the slave-holding territory 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 29 

of Virginia and Kentucky and the free shores of 
Canada. The northern counties knew negroes 
chiefly as panting fugitives; the southern coun- 
ties looked across the river upon a mild form of 
negro slavery, and themselves had a plentiful sprin- 
kling of freemen of the negro race. The northern 
counties turned eastward for their markets and 
their stocks of goods, while southern trade was the 
support of many communities on the Ohio River. 
It was inevitable that there should be jealousy and 
antagonism within the State, and that the rivalry 
of interests should some day find expression in 
politics; fortunately there were on the southern 
border a few men like Chase, who shared in the 
antagonism to slavery, and who eventually created 
a common political standpoint for both sections 
of the State. 

It must not be forgotten that the negro question 
in Ohio was never extraneous, as it was in Massa- 
chusetts and Vermont. However little one might 
feel responsibility for slaves in Kentucky, it was 
impossible to dodge questions of the free-negro 
population in Ohio ; and the majority of the people 
in the State liked that element as little as it was 
liked in the South. In 1830 there were about 
7500 negroes in Ohio, of whom 2200 were in Cin- 
cinnati, and most of the others in towns. Most of 
the adults had been born slaves, had bought or 
received their freedom, and had then come across 
the borders, hoping to find better opportunity for 
themselves and their children than in the slave 



30 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

States ; but they were at the bottom of the com- 
munities from which they came, and most of them 
remained in a despised and degraded class in Ohio. 

The general policy of the States on both sides of 
the river was to prevent such people from changing 
their domicile. In 1807 the Ohio legislature passed 
a stringent law for the registration of the free ne- 
groes, requiring them to give bonds that they would 
not become a public charge, and subjecting them to 
exclusion from the State if the security were refused 
or neglected; at the same time, any person who 
harbored an unregistered free negro was liable to 
a large fine. This law remained a dead letter, 
partly from the difficulty of administration, but 
chiefly because the community needed hewers of 
wood and drawers of water and seethers of flesh 
and fullers of fine linen ; and when it came to the 
point, Cincinnati, like every Southern community 
which has ever faced the problem, preferred the 
free negro to no negro at all. 

Under the constitution of Ohio, negroes were as 
a matter of course excluded from voting, and by 
statutes similar to those of all slave-holding, and 
of some free, States, they were put in a position 
of painful legal inferiority: thus their testimony 
could not be received against white persons, even 
to corroborate white witnesses ; they had no right 
to public education, even though they paid school 
taxes ; and where law did not reach, public senti- 
ment came in, to prevent white people from em- 
ploying colored mechanics, to keep the negroes out 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 31 

of the best quarters of the cities, and to prevent 
any kind of social intercourse. 

The negro population was of various kinds. 
Many of the negroes had lost, or had never pos- 
sessed, legal proofs of their freedom ; many others 
knew that they were fugitives, and of these a con- 
siderable number were slowly buying their freedom. 
Indeed, a theological student is known to have 
provided for his education from the installments 
thus paid by a man for his own flesh, and to have 
charged the poor negro twelve per cent on deferred 
payments ; and a negro child in a charitable school 
excused her absence by explaining, " I 'm staying at 
home to help buy father." Hence when, in 1829, an 
attempt was made in Cincinnati to enforce the 
registration law of 1807, the colored people in ex- 
tremity sent a committee to see whether homes 
could be found in Canada. But before the emigra- 
tion could be arranged, a mob descended upon 
them, and there were street fights, in which some 
of the assailants were killed. Eventually fright 
drove out 1100 of the 2200 negroes in the city, of 
whom many went to Canada. The whole incident 
is a proof that the prejudices against the negro 
race were as strong on the north bank of the Ohio 
as on the south, and that the ordinary principles of 
the right to labor, of movement from place to place, 
and of legal privileges did not apply to men and 
women of dark skins. 

Side by side with the manifest distaste of the 
people of Ohio for free negroes stood the entire 






32 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 



willingness of certain inhabitants, black and white, 
to harbor and aid fugitive slaves. The Ohio River 
was a barrier easily to be passed by anybody who 
could paddle a skiff, and on the northern side 
there had been, ever since 1787, forerunners of 
what came later to be called the " Underground 
Railroad." By the Ordinance of 1787, the right 
of masters to recover their slaves from the North- 
west Territory was affirmed ; by the Constitution, 
that right was to be continued in every State ad- 
mitted to the Union ; and by the federal statute of 
1793 the method of search was defined. This 
statute recognized the right of a master, or of his 
agent, to lay hands upon his fugitive, found any- 
where in a free State, and proprio motu to drag 
him back, provided any magistrate held that the 
person arrested was the escaped slave. It pro- 
vided for no system of testimony, allowed no jury 
to determine even the question of identity, made 
no promise that the courts of the slave State should 
examine questions of disputed freedom, and gave 
the master the powers of an officer of the law in a 
- State of which he was not a citizen. The statute 
was anomalous, because the existence of free and 
slave States in the same Union was an anomaly ; it 
provided no proper security for the actual rights of 
free negroes, because those rights were little re- 
spected anywhere ; and it ignored the fact that, 
while in the South the presumption was that a 
wandering negro was a slave, in the North the pre- 
sumption in every case was that he was a freeman. 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 33 

From the date of the Act of 1793 it proved 
useless in the New England States. The first case 
in Massachusetts, arising in that very year, led to 
a violent rescue in open court ; and in 1796 Presi- 
dent Washington was informed that he could not 
safely set the machinery of the law in motion to 
recover a slave woman from Portsmouth, N. H. 
In the States bordering on slave-holding regions 
the law had more force. In Pennsylvania, Ohio, 
Indiana, and Illinois fugitive-slave cases were com- 
mon, and usually the seizure was unresisted. But 
many masters lost the trail, or would not go to the 
trouble and expense of pursuit ; and there were 
many negroes (like an " Uncle Tom " whom the 
writer remembers in northern Ohio) who were well 
known in the whole countryside to be fugitives. 
The legal question was further complicated by the 
fact that the Ohio Kiver was part of a direct high- 
way from Virginia and Maryland to the far South, 
and that negroes in transit were often brought into 
ports on the Ohio side of the channel ; hence the 
question might fairly be raised whether such per- 
sons were " fugitives." 

By the operation of the Black Laws, by propin- 
quity to slave-holding territory, and by the object 
lesson of fugitive slaves, the people of Ohio were 
compelled to know something of the institution 
and to take some responsibility for it. Both as a 
question of morals and as a question of political 
liberty, the startling contrast between slavery and 
Christian American civilization inevitably came 



34 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

before men's minds, and the result was the anti- 
slavery agitation, which swiftly developed into an 
abolition movement. Not only was Ohio a free 
State, it had never had any other than a free 
organization. The Ordinance of 1787, secured by 
Massachusetts men who desired to found a colony 
on the principles with which they were familiar, but 
also passed with the assent of every Southern mem- 
ber present, provided that " there shall be neither 
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Ter- 
ritory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes 
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." 
This clause did not apply to slaves already in the 
Territory ; but, fortunately, as yet the only slave- 
holders in the Northwest were a few French settlers 
and some Southern squatters ; and the slaves held 
in 1787 gradually died off, so that in 1840 slaves 
appear for the last time in the census list for 
Ohio. The state constitution of 1802 repeated 
the phrase of the Ordinance, with the result that 
there was, and could be, no state statute authoriz- 
ing any person to restrain another of his liberty 
on the ground that he was a " slave," unless he had 
" fled " from " another State " and was " found " 
in Ohio. 

From 1775 to 1830 the opinion of most thought- 
ful statesmen, North and South, was that slavery 
was a great evil, which good men ought to dis- 
countenance ; and there was in most States of the 
Union some kind of organization which opposed 
slavery, with much the same feeling with which 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 35 

reformers might now oppose child labor. An 
anti-slavery society, founded at Ripley, Ohio, pro- 
bably before 1810, continued to exist for more 
than twenty years ; and so late as 1820 national 
anti-slavery conventions were held, usually in South- 
ern States, and sent out appeals against the sys- 
tem, and memorials to Congress. The feeling on 
this subject was not very different in Ohio and 
Kentucky, and freedom of speech in criticism of 
slavery was about as great in one community as 
in the other. It was the Missouri Compromise 
debate of 1820 which roused the country to the 
fact that insensibly slavery had become so profit- 
able that the South held it an unfriendly act to 
limit its extension. In that great contest the Ohio 
delegation in Congress was on the side of freedom 
for Missouri, but eventually consented to the Com- 
promise. 

Between 1820 and 1830 a change of feeling was 
visible in the South : instead of keeping to the view 
of men like Jefferson that slavery was an evil, and 
eventually must disappear, the trend of opinion was 
toward the doctrine that slavery was unfortunate, 
but could not be ended without ruin to the whole 
community. The next step, consciously taken 
only after the abolition movement gained headway, 
was to defend slavery as a good thing in itself. 
Slowly the idea gained ground in the North that 
slavery would not die a natural death, and that it 
behooved the friends of freedom to organize. An 
apostle of anti-slavery was found in Benjamin 



36 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Lundy, who worked in Tennessee and Missouri, 
organized an anti-slavery society in Ohio in 1817, 
and in 1821 began to publish his " Genius of Uni- 
versal Emancipation " in that State. Other Ohio 
societies were founded in southern and southeast- 
ern counties, and the movement for an organized 
protest never wholly died out. In 1824 the Ohio 
legislature even passed resolutions in favor of 
emancipation. 

Except for repeated attempts to get rid of slav- 
ery in the District of Columbia, there was between 
1820 and 1830 no widespread Northern interest 
either in the attack on slavery or in its defense. 
William Lloyd Garrison took upon himself in 
1831 the task of compelling his countrymen to 
face the question, and his success not only proved 
his own tremendous intensity, but also showed 
that thousands of men all over the country were 
aroused already and only waited for the kindling 
spark. Garrisonian abolition, however, always had 
three disadvantages : its seat was in a common- 
wealth not much affected by actual slavery ; it was 
conducted almost entirely by men born in free 
States ; and it abjured political action. Although 
Garrison made addresses in Ohio, his influence 
in the anti-slavery movement in the West was 
not direct, but was exerted through his disciples. 
Once aroused, the Ohio abolitionists had three 
powerful advantages : they knew the benumbing 
effect of slavery in neighboring States ; they might 
call in the aid of anti-slavery men who had been 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 37 

slaveholders; and they did not underrate the 
method of political organization. 

Most accounts of the slavery contest have been 
written by New England men, to whom the word 
" abolitionist " has brought up chiefly the figures of 
Garrison and Wendell Phillips; but instead of 
"the abolition movement" there were three dif- 
ferent movements, working rarely together, though 
usually side by side, — New England abolition, 
Middle-State abolition, and Western abolition. 
The third, or Western, movement was from the be- 
ginning the most effective, because it was brought 
face to face with the actualities of slavery, and 
because it used political means to destroy the traces 
of the accursed system in its own communities. 

From 1831 to 1835 the abolitionists in Ohio, as 
well as those elsewhere, were learning to forge their 
weapons for the tremendous task which they had 
undertaken. The movement would have had no 
more vitality than the contemporary anti-Masonic 
episode, but for one of those inherent weaknesses 
in slavery which were ultimately to set at naught 
the counsels of the ungodly. Upon the face of 
things, a man might say in Massachusetts or in 
Ohio that slavery was wrong, or even that slave- 
holders were criminals, as freely as he might say 
that judicial torture in China was wrong, or that 
the serf-owners of Kussia were criminals ; and an 
American citizen had as much right to petition for 
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia 
as for regulation of immigrant vessels. Indeed, the 



38 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

spirit and the letter of the laws all over the country- 
allowed peaceable public meetings and criticisms 
by speakers and newspapers, even though acrid 
things were said about neighbors in other States. 
In the case of slavery, however, such attacks were 
held to destroy the value of property, and — what 
was even more serious — they tended to make the 
slaves discontented; moreover, it was generally 
believed in the South that they must lead to slave 
insurrections. None of these dangers dismayed the 
abolitionist ; if free speech and slavery could not 
live in the same federal Union, that fact was to his 
mind an additional reason for giving up slavery, 
while to the startled slaveholder it seemed a rea- 
son for abolishing free speech. 

In Ohio there was from 1830 to 1849 a specific 
objective point for the abolitionists in the repeal of 
the Black Laws, attainable by action of the legis- 
lature ; but even in that State the main issue for 
some years was simply the right of a man to ex- 
press his sentiments on a public question under pro- 
tection of the state laws. Two centres of abolition 
agitation were speedily developed, one in the Con- 
necticut Western Reserve in northern Ohio, and 
the other in and about Cincinnati. In that city 
was a group of the most powerful enemies who 
could be raised up against slavery, — sons of South- 
ern slaveholders, or themselves former slavehold- 
ers, who out of their own experience had come to 
hate slavery and to fight it. Among them were 
Rev. Samuel Crothers; Dr. John Rankin, long 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 39 

pastor at Ripley on the Ohio, and agent of the 
Underground Railroad; the two Dickeys; Wal- 
lace ; and the Quaker, Levi Coffin. There was also 
a group of men born or domiciled in Ohio, who 
hated slavery on their own responsibility, and early 
joined forces with the immigrants from the South. 
What was now needed was agitation, organiza- 
tion, and persecution; and in 1834, 1835, and 
1836 southern Ohio saw all these ; and influences 
were then set at work which eventually drew 
Chase into the anti-slavery ranks. In 1829, at 
Walnut Hills, a new suburb of Cincinnati, Lane 
Seminary was founded, for the training of young 
men for the Presbyterian ministry. Of the one 
hundred students, more than half were Southern- 
ers ; but the president was Lyman Beecher of 
Connecticut ; his son-in-law, Stowe, was associated 
with him as professor, and one of the instructors 
was Theodore D. Weld of Massachusetts, who had 
brought a body of students from Oneida Insti- 
tute, New York. Weld had already come under 
the influence of Garrison, and had thus become an 
intense abolitionist. In 1833 the young men of the 
Seminary began to talk on slavery as a natural 
topic of discussion, of special interest to the com- 
munities from which they came. In 1834 the two 
forces joined issue in a debate in the chapel, which 
lasted eighteen consecutive nights ; a former slave 
was allowed to give his testimony, and the exciting 
discussion closed with the decision of some of the 
Southern students, notably Allan and Thome, that 



40 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

they were thenceforth enemies to slavery. Works 
went hand in hand with faith ; the students began 
to start Sunday and day schools for negro children 
at Cincinnati, and to bring a pressure to bear on 
religious organizations. 

This dangerous crisis was promptly met by the 
Trustees. In August, 1834, they voted that there 
should thenceforth be no discussion of slavery in 
any public room of the seminary, because it was a 
" political " subject ; and they dropped John Mor- 
gan, one of the anti-slavery men, who had been 
principal of the preparatory department. One of 
the Trustees, Eev. Asa Mahan, at once resigned, 
but Beecher and Stowe were absent, and hence 
for the time accepted the situation. Not so the 
students, of whom fifty-one left the seminary in a 
body. Where were they to go ? James C. Lud- 
low, whose daughter Chase married in 1846, lent 
them a building near the city, in which for five 
months they taught themselves, with the aid of 
some lectures by Dr. Bailey, who about this time 
became Chase's intimate friend. Thus the effort 
to save the seminary from the evil effects of con- 
troversy had led only to disruption. When, the 
next year, one of these students, Amos Dresser, was 
found in Kentucky with abolition documents in his 
possession, he was seized by a mob and brutally 
whipped ; but this incident only called wider public 
attention to the troubles of Lane Seminary, and 
was a stock example of the barbarity of the system 
of slavery. 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 41 

Meanwhile, in northern Ohio, a place was pre- 
paring for an anti-slavery seminary which might 
receive the Lane seceders and plant a new aboli- 
tion stronghold. In 1833 it entered the minds of 
Rev. John J. Shipherd of Elyria, Ohio, twenty- 
five miles west of Cleveland, and Philo P. Stewart, 
manufacturer of cooking-stoves, to found in the 
backwoods of Ohio a Christian commonwealth, 
with " as perfect a community of interest as 
though we had a community of property." They 
deliberately chose a spot remote from other vil- 
lages, in the township of Russia, and there in 
April, 1833, they set up the first house in Ober- 
lin, so named from a philanthropic pastor of the 
Vosges Mountains. In December, 1833, a school 
was founded with forty-four students, under the 
name of " Oberlin Collegiate Institute," which, like 
many academies of the time, undertook to carry 
pupils " from the infant school up through a colle- 
giate and theological course." 

At the very beginning the founders took a pio- 
neer step in college education by setting forth as 
a purpose of the institution " the elevation of 
female character by bringing within the reach of 
the misjudged and neglected sex all the instruc- 
tive privileges which hitherto unreasonably distin- 
guished the leading sex from theirs." The educa- 
tion of negroes, or even of anti-slavery agitators, 
was not a part of the original plan ; but Mr. Ship- 
herd was aroused by the news from Lane Seminary, 
went to Cincinnati, and reported, in December, 



42 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

1834, that they must engage as professors Rev. 
Asa Mahan, and Morgan, the dismissed instructor ; 
adding that those men would come to Oberlin 
only on condition that students should be admitted 
" irrespective of color." 

There was an uproar in Oberlin, with many 
threats of withdrawal from the community and the 
school. There were as yet few, if any, out-and-out 
abolitionists in the place, and the Trustees at first 
voted not to take action which would put Oberlin 
on a different footing from other schools in Ohio. 
In a second meeting, however, they voted : " That 
the education of the people of color is a matter of 
great interest, and should be encouraged and sus- 
tained in the institution." Thereupon Mahan ac- 
cepted the presidency and Morgan a professorship, 
and with them came thirty of the Lane seceders, 
including Amos Dresser, while others went to West- 
ern Eeserve College. The school rapidly increased, 
though of two hundred and seventy-seven students 
in 1835 only one was colored. Theodore D. Weld 
now came to Oberlin as an abolitionist lecturer and 
converted the doubters, and from that time to the 
end of the Civil War, Oberlin was a radiating point 
for an incessant abolition propaganda. The Lane 
students and their successors went out as apostles 
all over the State; they lectured, they preached, 
they wrote, they endured persecutions ; they scat- 
tered through the Northwest, and brought up their 
children to fight the slave power. In Oberlin the 
colored students became about a sixteenth of the 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 43 

whole number, and the colored population about a 
fourth ; the place was a junction on the Under* 
ground Railroad, and a meeting-place for radical 
abolitionists; and since the Oberlinites never for 
a moment accepted Garrison's policy of non-inter- 
vention, they voted, and in 1848 their votes re- 
turned the man who came to hold the balance of 
power in the Ohio senatorial contest, and who cast 
his deciding ballot for Salmon P. Chase. 

Oberlin was not the only anti-slavery centre of 
northern Ohio. For some years Elizur Wright 
and Beriah Green were professors in Western Re- 
serve College at Hudson, — the Western Yale, — 
where they poured forth anti-slavery doctrine till 
they were compelled to resign. The Western Re- 
serve was peopled chiefly by immigrants from 
Connecticut, a church-going and a reading folk, 
provided with good schools and able newspapers ; 
hence the anti-slavery seed there fell upon good 
soil, and gradually there grew up a constituency 
massed in one congressional district, in which the 
anti-slavery men were predominant. From that 
district of the Western Reserve in 1838 came Gid- 
dings, the first Western anti-slavery member of 
the national House of Representatives; and he 
was steadily reelected at every opportunity up to 
1860. 

The Lane Seminary and Oberlin movements 
came to a head early in 1835, and the next step 
was to form an organization of the anti-slavery 
men throughout the State. A state convention of 



44 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

more than one hundred delegates was held at 
Putnam in April, 1835, at which many of the 
Lane seceders were present, among them Weld, 
H. B. Stanton (later a life-long friend of Chase), 
and Horace Bushnell. The main work of the 
meeting was the foundation of the " Ohio Anti- 
Slavery Society," to be carried on in organic rela- 
tion with the national society. Most of the few 
remaining old anti-slavery societies in Ohio affili- 
ated themselves with the new society, and other 
auxiliaries were organized ; so that at the end of 
the year there were a hundred and twenty socie- 
ties, with more than ten thousand members. An- 
other fruit of the meeting and the society was an 
able " Report on the Condition of the People of 
Color in the State of Ohio," which opened the eyes 
of the community to the character of the Black 
Laws. 

No Cincinnati newspaper sympathized with the 
movement ; hence the next step was to found a 
distinct abolition journal. At this point appears 
one of the most interesting figures in the whole 
Western abolition movement, James G. Birney, a 
Kentuckian by birth, once a slaveholder, who had 
by sheer force of his own conscience renounced 
the system and set free his remaining slaves. Bir- 
ney felt that he understood the difficulties of slav- 
ery better than the Garrisonians did, and he planned 
an anti-slavery journal which should command re- 
spect by its studied moderation of tone and avoid- 
ance of hard language. Although a Kentucky 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 45 

state society was founded in 1835, he found it im- 
possible to start his paper in that State; accord- 
ingly he crossed the river, and in 1836 set up the 
" Philanthropist " at a little town above Cincin- 
nati ; and the new state society afterward agreed 
to publish it in Cincinnati. 

Precisely the issue was now made which caused 
the murder of Lovejoy at Alton in 1837, namely, 
the right to publish in a border town a paper 
censuring the institutions of the neighbor State; 
and substantially the same means were adopted to 
stop the paper as in Lovejoy's case. Cincinnati 
had at just that time, July, 1836, a number of 
Southern visitors, and it profited by Southern 
trade. Accordingly a public meeting was called to 
protest against the " Philanthropist." The mayor 
of the city presided, with various local dignitaries 
as vice-presidents, and resolutions were passed 
against the proposed paper. As this action had 
no effect, on July 12 the printing-office was broken 
into by a mob and badly damaged. The mayor is- 
sued a proclamation against the rioters, but he 
directed it also against the persistent abolitionists. 
Birney's rejoinder was to repair his press for the 
continuance of his paper. The next step, July 23, 
was a rousing anti-abolition meeting, which repre- 
hended the violence of the abolitionists, and ap- 
pointed a committee to advise Birney to desist. 
Judge Burnet, Lawrence (the president of the 
Lafayette Bank), and other friends of Chase ac- 
cepted membership, and urged upon the executive 



46 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

committee of the Ohio society that such a paper 
was damaging to the city ; not a single local news- 
paper defended the right of free speech or spoke 
out for its own inestimable privilege of a free 
press. 

During the years of agitation in Ohio, and of 
especial excitement in Cincinnati, where was the 
ardent young New England lawyer, Chase ? The 
question of slavery had several times come before 
his mind since he first went to Washington. The 
status of slavery in the District of Columbia was 
peculiar. Congress had never legislated directly 
on the subject, but by the act of 1801 had or- 
dained that existing laws of all kinds were to con- 
tinue in force till altered. Those existing laws in- 
cluded an elaborate slave code, which in the course 
of years was outgrown by the humanitarian spirit 
of Maryland, and therefore was modified by state 
statutes, but remained unamended in the District. 
Besides a system of Black Laws, like that of Ohio, 
there were also fierce punishments for slave offenses, 
such as hanging and quartering; and stray ne- 
groes taken up and unable to give a good account 
of themselves might be jailed for inquiry, and 
then sold for their jail fees. In 1828 humanita- 
rian petitioners had for some years been pressing 
Congress to prohibit slavery in the District, and 
Chase was drawn into the agitation in a manner 
which he describes as follows : " One day a respect- 
able Quaker, a mechanic, I think, called on me with 
a paper, or some scraps of paper containing the 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 47 

leading ideas for a petition to Congress for the 
gradual abolition of slavery in the District, and 
requested me to make out from them the draft 
of a petition for circulation. I complied cheer- 
fully with his request. The petition was drawn 
and put in circulation, whether exactly as I drew 
it or after being modified by other hands I cannot 
say, and received over a thousand signatures from 
nearly all the leading men of the District of every 
station and occupation and was presented to Con- 
gress, I think in 1828." 

Biographers and panegyrists of Chase have 
attempted to prove by this incident a moral in- 
terest which Chase never claimed for it ; he acted 
simply as a clerk, and during the next seven years 
he gave no evidence that in his judgment the slav- 
ery question was vital. In 1829, after reading a 
speech delivered in the Virginia Constitutional 
Convention, which asserted that the laborers of the 
free States were no more intelligent than the slaves, 
and ought to have no more political privileges, he 
noted in his diary that such a sentiment was "ut- 
terly abhorrent to many people of equal rights." 
In 1830, in his article on Henry Brougham, he 
praises him as " the advocate of human liberty " 
and as "the able champion of the injured and 
downtrodden children of Africa;" and he even 
quotes with approval Brougham's appeal to " a law 
above all the enactments of human codes ; . . . 
and by that law . . . they shall reject the wild 
and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in 



48 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

man." But Chase does not here put himself for- 
ward as an " advocate of liberty," and in June, 
1831, he even critically discusses the Ordinance of 
1787, with no word of praise for its anti-slavery 
clause. In his " History of Ohio," published in 
1833, he again considers the Ordinance, but care- 
fully avoids any controversy. 

This is all the positive evidence that Chase had 
convictions on slavery earlier than 1836. In his 
diaries, his letter-books, and the many letters sent 
to him, not a word appears which shows that he had 
so much as heard of Garrison ; the Lane Seminary 
episode passes unnoticed ; the convention of 1835, 
the Oberlin contentions, the new state society, 
Birney's attempts to found the " Philanthropist," — 
all these were less important in his eyes than ob- 
taining the use of public school rooms for Sunday- 
schools, or " brother William's debts." 

Like thousands of other anti-slavery men, like 
John Quincy Adams, like Wendell Phillips, Chase 
was aroused not by the wrongs of the slave but by 
the dangers to free white men. He did not hear 
the cries at the Covington whipping-post across the 
river, but he could not mistake the shouts of the 
mob which destroyed Birney's property and sought 
his life ; his earliest act as an anti-slavery man was 
to stand for the every-day right of a fellow resident 
of Cincinnati to express his mind. An autobio- 
graphical fragment, found among his papers, de- 
scribes his conversion to positive anti-slavery. 

" At this time I had come to regard the Slavery 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 49 

question as among the most important questions of 
the day ; and I was not long in discovering it to be 
the most important. I heard with disgust and horror 
the mob violence directed against the Anti-Slavery 
Press and Anti-Slavery men of Cincinnati in 1836. 
My own sister was the wife of one of the most 
worthy and respectable of these Anti-Slavery men, 
Dr. Isaac Colby. Through them I had become 
personally acquainted with most of them, though 
I did not at this time know Mr. Birney, the Editor 
of the Paper. I knew them to be as pure, upright, 
and worthy citizens as Cincinnati contained. Yet 
against these men and their families the fury of a 
mob, stirred up by politicians and by emissaries 
from slave States, was directed. My own sister left 
her house and took refuge in mine. I was opposed 
at this time to the views of the abolitionists, but I 
now recognized the slave power as the great enemy 
of freedom of speech freedom of the press and 
freedom of the person. I took an open part against 
the mob. Of the prominent citizens very few 
stood decidedly on that side. Charles Hammond, 
a man who had some faults and many virtues, among 
which last were true greatness of soul and intense 
horror of cowardice and meanness, was chief among 
these few. I drafted and he with others signed a 
call for a meeting of those opposed to mobs. He 
and I drafted the resolutions intended to be pre- 
sented in the meeting : but when the hour came 
and we repaired to the Court House we found the 
mob there and a meeting organized. A committee 



50 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

was appointed and I was named upon it. In the 
Committee I read the resolutions we had prepared, 
but they were voted down, and others reported in 
their place which, under the circumstances, were 
justly regarded as approving rather than censuring 
the mob. Shortly after the meeting adjourned 
I was for a time in a good deal of personal danger 
in consequence of a declaration that I would sooner 
give ten thousand dollars than see the press de- 
stroyed by a mob. But my assailants contented 
themselves with denunciation, without proceeding to 
a personal attack. On the night of one of these days 
a mob gathered around the door of the Franklin 
House, determined to enter and make search for 
Mr. Birney. I stood in the doorway, and told them, 
calmly but resolutely, no one could pass. They 
paused. One of them asked who I was ? I gave my 
name. One, who seemed a ringleader, said I should 
answer for this. I told him I could be found at any 
time. The mob did not choose to attack me in my 
position, and after a while, to my great relief, the 
Mayor, who had been in the House, came out and 
declared to the mob that Mr. Birney was not there, 
upon which they drew off. 

" From this time on, although not technically an 
abolitionist, I became a decided opponent of Sla- 
very and the Slave Power: and if any chose to 
call me an abolitionist on that account, I was at 
no trouble to disclaim the name. I differed from 
Mr. Garrison and others as to the means by which 
the Slave Power could be best overthrown and 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 51 

Slavery most safely and fitly abolished under our 
American Constitution ; not in the conviction that 
these objects were of paramount importance. 

" In 1837 I first publicly declared my views in 
respect to Legislation under the Constitution for 
the Extradition of Fugitives from Service." 

Chase's narrative plainly refers to the second 
Birney mob, of July 30-31, 1836, in which the office 
of the " Philanthropist " was sacked, and some negro 
houses were attacked. General William Birney, 
in his published life of his father and in personal 
conference with the writer, declares that Chase, 
together with his partner Eels, had visited James 
Birney in the previous year, 1835, and had even 
examined a title for him ; and that his father by 
elaborate argument prepared Chase's mind to ac- 
cept anti-slavery doctrine. That Chase had already 
known Birney is disproved by his own positive re- 
membrance that he had no acquaintance with Birney 
before the mob. Nevertheless there can be no 
doubt that Birney's genial personality, conviction, 
and lucidity of statement, were the strongest, most 
direct, and most effective influences in bringing 
Chase to place himself decisively among the few 
score abolitionists of Cincinnati. That Chase 
would in the end have taken up the anti-slavery 
cause is probable ; but from Birney proceeded the 
spark which kindled Chase's soul. General Wil- 
liam Birney cannot be mistaken in his recollections 
of the long conferences in his father's library; 
Chase was Birney's counsel in the Matilda case in 



52 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

1837, and thus publicly associated himself with the 
reformer ; and a close examination shows that the 
constitutional arguments with which Chase smote 
the Amalekites were founded on Birney's theses, 
thought over in Chase's mind till he gave them 
his own stamp. Should other evidence be in- 
sufficient, a letter of June 5, 1837, from Birney to 
Chase, written before Chase had ever made any 
public profession of anti-slavery, shows how com- 
plete was the understanding between them. Birney 
writes confidentially, in accordance with a promise 
made to Chase to inform him of the anti-slavery out- 
look in the East. He tells of a visit to Newport 
and of Dr. Channing's agreement to join in the agi- 
tation ; of his two hours' conversation with John 
Quincy Adams, who desired the support of the abo- 
litionists in his protest against the annexation of 
Texas ; and he urges Chase to stir up all the Cincin- 
nati newspapers against that project. It is the 
cry of one soldier calling to another on the battle- 
field. 

The instrument of Chase's conversion to anti- 
slavery was still not the ultimate cause. There 
must have been some deeper reason why Chase, just 
established in a pro-slavery community, should turn 
his back on his own apparent interests to take up a 
cause inexpressibly distasteful to most of the refined 
and educated people there — his acquaintances ; 
and it is still more remarkable that he should 
have put himself out of relation with both the 
political cohorts which were about to become 



ANTI-SLAVERY IN OHIO 53 

national political parties. The testimony of those 
who came closest to him is that he took up the anti- 
slavery cause because he felt it to be a religious 
duty, because he believed slavery to be a dreadful 
moral wrong. Ten years later, indeed, he was 
much concerned at the apathy shown toward slavery 
by the Episcopal church, of which he was a mem- 
ber; and all his writings and speeches through- 
out his life are permeated with the prime conviction 
that slavery can have no legal justification, not 
only because it is contrary to the laws of nature, 
but because it offends and outrages the laws of 
God. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 

When a moral conviction was once established 
in Chase's mind, it never could be removed ; but 
he was & man whose convictions grew upon him as 
time went on, and it was several years before he 
had worked out in his own mind the argument 
against slavery which should carry his principles 
into other minds. Once enlisted in the anti-slavery 
cause, he gave to it most of the twenty-four years 
of his life from 1837 to 1861. 

Yet Chase never held himself to be an " aboli- 
tionist," but always insisted that he was an " anti- 
slavery man." In 1834 the Cincinnati " Gazette " 
said that he was " one of the most distinguished 
lawyers of the State and . . . not an abolitionist." 
In 1840 he declined to sign a call to an anti-slavery 
convention. In 1843 he " discussed with Mr. H. 
the principles of Liberty men as distinguished from 
abolitionists." In 1851 he said in the Senate: 
" I am aware there are some abolitionists or anti- 
slavery men who regard the Constitution as at war 
with moral obligations and the supreme law. I 
am not of them." His last speech on the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, in 1854, and his public utterances 
in 1855, indignantly disavowed any sympathy with 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 55 

the disunion sentiments of Garrison, a compliment 
which the " Liberator " and Edmund Quincy repaid 
in 1859, when they called him a " political huck- 
ster, who hopes to carry his principles to the presi- 
dential market." Gideon Welles, Chase's colleague 
in Lincoln's cabinet, says that Chase was sensitive 
at being considered a political abolitionist ; and in 
a letter of 1863 Chase himself says of his attitude: 
" I never was an abolitionist of that school which 
taught that there could never be a human duty 
superior to that of the instant and unconditional 
abolition of slavery." 

The distinction which Chase made had a logical 
ground and much political importance, so far as it 
related to that Garrisonian abolition which then as 
now was too often accepted as the type of abolition 
in general. It was a distinction perfectly clear-cut 
in the East, where John Quincy Adams always re- 
fused to be called an abolitionist, though for years 
the national champion against the slave power. If 
Garrison and Wendell Phillips were the typical 
genuine abolitionists, Chase was never an aboli- 
tionist: Garrison was for an aggressive warfare on 
slavery in the slave States ; Chase was for warfare 
everywhere except in the slave States: Garrison 
kept himself and his followers out of politics ; 
Chase was the great organizer of political anti- 
slavery : Garrison was for disunion so as to get 
relief from responsibility for slavery ; Chase was 
for making the Union free so as to destroy the dis- 
ease altogether. 



56 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

On the great question of the immediate purpose 
of the abolition movement Chase was also at odds 
with the Garrisonians ; and he thus expressed his 
dissent in a letter to Theodore Parker in 1856: 
" I adopt your motto very cheerfully and heartily, 
'No slavery anywhere in America. No slavery 
anywhere on earth ! ' The latter is, you say, the 
4 topmost ' idea. The first, then, is not topmost. 
My sentence, * No slavery outside of the slave 
States,' also is not 'topmost/ But it is, to an 
earnest man, anxious to get to the top, quite as 
important. It is fundamental. The general gov- 
ernment has power to prohibit slavery everywhere 
outside of slave States. A great majority of the 
people now accept this idea. Comparatively few 
adopt the suggestion that Congress can legislate 
abolition within slave States. ... I say, then, 
take the conceded proposition and make it practi- 
cal. Make it a living, active reality. Then you 
have taken a great step. Slavery is denationalized." 

With the Ohio abolitionists, however, Chase 
sympathized and consorted ; for they had a very 
practical knowledge of what slavery was, frequent 
occasion to exercise their abolition principles in aid 
of fugitives, and, above all, the robust intention of 
making their principles felt through the ballot-box. 
The Western abolitionists dealt less in invective 
than did their Eastern brethren, and more in ex- 
postulation, both because so many of them had 
been born on slave soil, and hence could appeal as 
repentant brothers to Southerners still out of a 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 57 

state of grace, and also because they knew better 
than did the New England agitators the real hope- 
lessness of getting the South to act against its ap- 
parent economic interest. The Western men knew 
what they wanted as well as their Eastern friends, 
and seemed to know better how to get it : in their 
aims they were abolitionists like Charles Sumner ; 
in their methods they were anti-slavery men like 
John Quincy Adams. But Joshua R. Giddings, 
their special representative in Congress, found him- 
self the friend, associate, and ally of both Sumner 
and Adams; and in like manner Chase worked 
with out-and-out abolition leaders, like Birney and 
Samuel Lewis and Dr. Bailey and Levi Coffin, 
because they all had in view the same ends ; and at 
the same time he stirred and organized many moder- 
ate anti-slavery men who never would go into an 
anti-slavery society, but who were willing to vote 
in a way to help the friends of liberty. 

However Chase may have deprecated the term 
"abolitionist," his views on slavery were so ad- 
vanced as to cost him friends and clients in Cin- 
cinnati. Several times he was assailed with stones 
or more fragile missiles when he spoke in Cincin- 
nati, and in 1855 he was unable to carry Hamilton 
County in his campaign for the governorship. On 
the other hand, Chase's activity made him ac- 
quainted throughout the State with men who were 
later very serviceable to him, and his fugitive-slave 
arguments soon gave him a national reputation. 
His was a case where honesty proved the best 



58 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

policy, where a man deliberately chose an unpopu- 
lar and unpromising cause, and by his very cour- 
age and willingness to sacrifice his interests was 
launched upon a more splendid career than he could 
ever have reached by letting himself go with the 
current. 

From 1841 Chase was a favorite speaker at anti- 
slavery meetings and conventions throughout Ohio, 
as well as in neighboring States, and even in the 
East. He was neither an orator nor a good stump- 
speaker ; indeed, a nervous hesitancy so affected 
his speech that he used to say: "My tongue is 
too large for my mouth ; " hence he used habitu- 
ally a clear, moderate utterance, which gave him 
time to shape his ideas as they came. For that 
reason his speeches were easy to report, and read 
well. Since he never could use the buffoonery 
which sets a great crowd in a roar, and which made 
his neighbor Tom Corwin a favorite speaker, he 
must appeal to reason, to the moral sense, at least 
to enlightened self-interest, not to the coarser pas- 
sions. Chase's principal deficiency as a public 
speaker was his lack of a sense of humor. He 
could not discharge such a barbed arrow of satire 
as Wade's famous criticism on the proposed annex- 
ation of Cuba: "It is not a question of giving 
lands to the landless, but of giving niggers to the 
niggerless." Yet he was a very effective speaker, 
always well grounded, prepared to confront objec- 
tions if not too unexpectedly put, calm, cool, dig- 
nified, an impersonation of reason inspired with 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 59 

righteous indignation. He had great endurance, 
and knew how to make many speeches on the same 
theme without too much repetition. His favorite 
topic was the illegality of slavery, but he knew also 
how to deliver good hearty blows against his politi- 
cal opponents, how to detect and bring home their 
inconsistencies. 

Chase's forte, however, lay in the preparation of 
formal addresses and platforms, because there he 
had more room and more opportunity to marshal 
his thoughts. Such tasks were often intrusted to 
him by the Liberty and Free-Soil men from 1841 
to 1848. He wrote the national Liberty Platform 
of 1843, the stirring Liberty Address of 1845, the 
resolutions of the People's Convention of 1847, 
and the Free-Soil Platform of 1848. The " Address 
of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention," 
of June 12, 1845, is perhaps the best work that 
fell from Chase's pen during this period ; a short 
extract from it will illustrate better than could any 
criticism his style, principles, and method of at- 
tack. 

"WHAT WE MEAN TO DO. 

" Against this influence, against these infrac- 
tions of the Constitution, against these departures 
from the national policy originally adopted, against 
these violations of the national faith originally 
pledged, we solemnly protest. Nor do we propose 
only to protest. We recognize the obligations 
which rest upon us as descendants of the men 
of the revolution, as inheritors of the institutions 



60 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

which they established, as partakers of the blessings 
which they so dearly purchased, to carry forward 
and perfect their work. We mean to do it, wisely 
and prudently, but with energy and decision. We 
have the example of our fathers on our side. We 
have the Constitution of their adoption on our 
side. It is our duty, and our purpose, to rescue 
the government from the control of the slave- 
holders ; to harmonize its practical administration 
with the provisions of the Constitution, and to se- 
cure to all, without exception, and without partial- 
ity, the rights which the Constitution guarantees. 
We believe that slaveholding in the United States 
is the source of numberless evils, moral, social, and 
political ; that it hinders social progress ; that it 
embitters public and private intercourse; that it 
degrades us as individuals, as States, and as a na- 
tion ; that it holds back our country from a splen- 
did career of greatness and glory. We are, there- 
fore, resolutely, inflexibly, at all times, and under 
all circumstances, hostile to its longer continuance 
in our land. We believe that its removal can be 
effected peacefully, constitutionally, without real 
injury to any, with the greatest benefit to all. 

"HOW WE MEAN TO DO IT. 

"We propose to effect this by repealing all 
legislation, and discontinuing all action, in favor 
of slavery, at home and abroad ; by prohibiting the 
practice of slaveholding in all places of exclusive 
national jurisdiction, in the District of Columbia, 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 61 

in American vessels upon the seas, in forts, ar- 
senals, navy yards ; by forbidding the employment 
of slaves upon any public work ; by adopting reso- 
lutions in Congress, declaring that slaveholding, in 
all States created out of national territories, is un- 
constitutional, and recommending to the others the 
immediate adoption of measures for its extinction 
within their respective limits ; and by electing and 
appointing to public station such men, and only 
such men as openly avow our principles, and will 
honestly carry out our measures." 

Another agency which Chase valued and cul- 
tivated was the anti-slavery press. There were 
three kinds of anti-slavery periodicals : the radical, 
aggressive abolition organs, especially Garrison's 
" Liberator ; " the political anti-slavery journal, of 
which the " National Era " was the chief ; and the 
local Liberty and Free-Soil papers. The " Liber- 
ator" furnished plenty of ammunition for aboli- 
tionists, but was hopelessly out of touch with the 
practical politics of Ohio. The " National Era," 
published in Washington, and edited by Dr. Bailey, 
formerly of Cincinnati, an intimate personal friend 
of Chase, was a good newspaper, and had a large 
influence throughout the country. The local papers 
were sometimes started for no other purpose than 
to defend abolition, or, more frequently, to defend 
the Liberty or Free-Soil party, and they found it 
a hard task to pay printers' bills. Chase sub- 
scribed for many of these papers, and raised, lent, 
or gave outright, money to keep some of the more 



62 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

important of them afloat ; indeed, he confessed in 
1852 that people expected too much of him in the 
way of financial support of these enterprises. 

Chase had a keen sense of the influence of news- 
paper editors and of their inside knowledge of the 
currents of public opinion. Dozens of them cor- 
responded with him, among them J. W. Taylor of 
the " Sandusky Register," one of Chase's former 
law students; Orren Follett of the "Ohio State 
Journal;" and especially E. S. Hamlin, editor of 
the " Standard" at Columbus, and political lieuten- 
ant to Chase. He also had relations with some of 
the great dailies in Ohio and outside, — with Moli- 
tur, the Cincinnati German, Bartlett of the Cincin- 
nati " Gazette," Horace Greeley of the New York 
" Tribune," Bigelow of the " Evening Post," and 
Dr. Leavitt of the " Independent ; " but it was al- 
ways a serious drawback to Chase's political hopes 
in Ohio that he had not the friendship of any of 
the influential Cleveland papers. He knew how to 
set an item afloat in the press, and how to prepare 
the way for a discharge of journalistic guns simul- 
taneously all along the line ; he kept scrap-books 
of newspaper extracts ; he sometimes wrote leading 
articles ; perhaps he overestimated the effect of the 
press in creating public opinion. 

Chase's powers of statement made him a welcome 
ally of the Ohio anti-slavery men, but he became 
their leader, in the period from 1837 to 1849, 
through services which deserve a careful descrip- 
tion. In the first place, he framed a convenient 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 63 

constitutional argument against the legality of 
slavery ; next, he applied his principles in a series 
of slavery cases, which drew upon him the atten- 
tion of the whole country ; and then he showed his 
friends how to build up an effective political organ- 
ization. 

The great safeguard of slavery was its founda- 
tion in vested property rights, protected by what 
seemed an impregnable legality; the great weak- 
ness of slavery was its total opposition to the sys- 
tem of democracy which existed alike in free States, 
slave States, and the federal government. So far 
as slavery within the States was concerned, the 
South might simply ask the abolitionists, " What 
are you going to do about it ? " Right or wrong, 
dangerous or favorable, slavery existed, slavery 
was lawful, and slavery was protected by public 
sentiment. When it came to the powers of the 
national government, however, the status of slav- 
ery was not so clear ; but still the slavocracy had 
a right to assert that the Convention of 1787 was 
aware of slavery, and had showed no purpose of 
interfering with it by its handiwork ; that the Con- 
stitution, in the clauses on the federal ratio, the 
slave trade, and fugitive slaves, recognized slavery ; 
and that Congress, through successive statutes, 
supposed to be constitutional, had authorized slav- 
ery in the District of Columbia, in some of the 
Territories, and (through the Fugitive Slave Act 
of 1793) even in the free States. 

If the discussion could have been kept down to 



64 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

questions of laws and constitutions, the South had 
the advantage of a title by undisputed possession. 
Hence the Garrisonian abolitionists forced the issue 
upon the other point : they denounced slavery as 
wasteful, cruel, aristocratic, demoralizing, murder- 
ous, and soul-destroying. To a sensitive people 
like the Southerners, who sincerely believed that 
they enjoyed the flower of human civilization, these 
attacks were unendurable; and for the sake of 
their own reputation before mankind they felt com- 
pelled to argue that slavery was economical, kind, 
democratic, civilizing, and beneficent to both blacks 
and whites. 

After this exchange of war cries, it would have 
been the true policy of the South to assume that 
the advantages of slavery would prove themselves 
to impartial men, and to rest behind the protection 
of undeniable state rights. At the beginning of 
the active controversy, about 1830, there were no 
Territories in dispute, and all that was needed by 
slaveholders was to stand on the right of every 
State to exclusive legislation on its "domestic 
institutions," and to make such laws as seemed 
good to them for the punishment of abolitionists or 
critics within their own borders. They came out 
of their own intrenchments when they demanded 
that the free States should throttle the abolition 
agitation, and when they took the ground that a 
free discussion of slavery anywhere in the United 
States was so dangerous to slavery that it must be 
stopped at any sacrifice of the principles of free 
speech or even of the Union. 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 65 

The Garrisonian abolitionists rid themselves of 
all the constitutional and state-rights arguments 
by declaring that the Constitution was " a league 
with death and a covenant with hell," and that they 
were willing to accept the logical consequence, — a 
division of the Union. This position, however con- 
sistent, fortunately was contrary to the instinct of 
the masses of the people, who felt that in the Union 
was their salvation. The Western abolitionists 
took up a more practical and more convincing line 
of argument, by pressing home the inexpediency 
and degradation of slavery, and at the same time by 
crossing the line to attack the South in its strong- 
hold of legality. 

An extreme position was that of Joshua R. Gid- 
dings, who held that the Declaration of Independ- 
ence had destroyed slavery when it declared that 
" all men are born equal " and " endowed with cer- 
tain inalienable rights, among which are life, lib- 
erty, and the pursuit of happiness ; " he insisted also 
that the Constitution was "an anti-slavery docu- 
ment." The more practical minds of Chase and his 
friends refused to accept Giddings's dogma ; they 
admitted without hesitation all that the South 
claimed regarding the legal right of a State to 
establish slavery, but treated it as simply a techni- 
cal right to organize a status of brute force ; from 
the right of a State to make a slave they deduced 
the principle that no other political organization 
could create a slave, and therefore they made a 
strenuous fight against any sanction or protection 



66 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

for slavery in the federal Constitution or through 
the federal government. 

This line of argument was suggested by Birney 
as early as December, 1836 ; it was worked into 
logical form by Lysander Spooner in 1845 ; it was 
a stock argument in Western anti-slavery meet- 
ings and newspapers, but Chase was the man who 
stated it most clearly and effectively. To us, who 
have lived through a civil war, when people man- 
aged to get on for years without a constitution, the 
whole discussion seems forced ; why dispute over 
the phrases of a document framed half a century 
earlier ? Because to the minds of men of that time, 
both North and South, an appeal to the Constitu- 
tion had the same kind of force as the equally 
common appeal to the Bible : they were both codes 
of law, — "what I have written, I have written." 
To be sure, the South did not maintain slavery 
simply because it thought the system constitutional 
or biblical, and the North did not move upon slav- 
ery because so bidden by the Constitution or the 
Bible ; but since the issue was a difference of moral 
and political standards in the two sections, each 
sought to avail itself of the conservative forces of 
society by showing that it was trying to protect 
a sound form of government and a God-ordained 
institution. If Chase could make out even a 
plausible case for the statement that the Constitu- 
tion was neither anti-slavery nor pro-slavery, but 
neutral, and that neutrality under American free 
government always meant freedom, he would give 






THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 67 

relief and encouragement to thousands of men who 
were attacking slavery on other than constitu- 
tional grounds. 

Nothing in Chase's life so well shows his logical 
powers, his moral sense, and the cause of his politi- 
cal success as his argument on slavery. It must 
of course be remembered that he took a brief in re 
servi, and made it his business to state every point 
which could possibly help his client; and it was no 
part of his function to prepare his opponent's case, 
or to call attention to decisions which bore against 
him. It must also be remembered that Chase had 
to meet an exaggerated argument that the Consti- 
tution invariably recognized and protected slavery 
wherever it was not clearly prohibited ; to which 
he replied that the federal government " could no 
more make a slave than make a king ; " and from 
that he plunged into declamation almost as exag- 
gerated as that of the other side. 

Chase's view of slavery, as a question of moral 
and political right, grew out of the fact that he 
was by nature and education a democrat. In 
addressing colored men in 1845, he said : " The 
moment the law excludes a portion of the commu- 
nity from its equal regard, it divides the community 
into higher and lower classes and introduces all 
the evils of the aristocratic principle." He was 
really a Jeffersonian, although he appealed to the 
great Democrat only as an opponent of slavery in 
the Territories and not as his political master. He 
was moreover by nature a strict constructionist. 



68 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

" The old theory of our fathers," said he, " is the 
true theory. Let us have a poor government 
and a rich people, — light taxes and abundant in- 
dividual enterprise, economical expenditure and 
steady prosperity, — a general government strictly 
limited to its sphere, and state governments re- 
spected and honored because competent and ready 
to protect the rights and guard the interests of the 
people/' 

How was the doctrine of democratic government 
and strict limitation of national power to be applied 
to slavery ? By what Chase in many addresses and 
speeches called the " denationalization of slavery." 
First of all he maintained that history showed that 
the fathers of the Constitution publicly discouraged 
slavery, and that there was an understanding that 
there should be no slavery in any unorganized or 
new Territory. " Our national government," said 
Chase, "therefore went into operation upon the 
principle of no slavery outside of slave States, upon 
the principle that slavery is local, not national ; " 
and he declared that the later doctrine of " equal- 
ity " between freedom and slavery was, " morally 
speaking, a base forgery," that there had not been 
an early purpose to keep up a balance of free and 
slave States. 

To Chase's mind, moreover, the attitude of the 
Constitution toward slavery was shown not only 
by its silence but by its language, especially in the 
amendment by which " no person shall be deprived 
of life, liberty, or property except by due process 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 69 

of law," which, he said, added a positive injunction 
and cut off any implication of a power to establish 
slavery by national authority. 

So far as the text of the Constitution and the 
purpose of its framers went, Chase was arguing 
against indisputable facts, and hence he could not 
convince slaveholders nor strengthen anti-slavery 
men. The actual legislation from 1789 to 1830 
was a continuous refutation of his position, for in 
1790 slavery was deliberately permitted by Con- 
gress in the territory south of the Ohio River, and 
three slave States were admitted between 1812 and 
1819. There can be no historical doubt that the 
framers of the Constitution perfectly understood 
the inconveniences of the " house divided against 
itself," but preferred union to consistency. Nobody 
could deny Chase's most effective point, — the de- 
sire and hope of the fathers that slavery might 
disappear ; but that argument was set aside in the 
fifties by the growing Southern opinion that the 
fathers knew less than their children about what 
was good for the South, and for mankind. 

Behind the constitutional argument, Chase took 
up a second line of defense, — an absolute denial 
of any power in Congress to establish slavery any- 
where by any process. Here again he was combat- 
ing the facts of history, for he was obliged to 
admit that laws had been framed to support slav- 
ery in the District of Columbia, in the Territories, 
and — so far as fugitives were concerned — in free 
States ; but he declared all such laws to be outside 



70 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

of the constitutional powers of Congress. Later 
in his career this position rather embarrassed him, 
for it was dangerously like Douglas's doctrine of 
non-intervention and the principles of the Dred 
Scott decision. The difference, indeed, was chiefly 
one of motive. Chase denied the power of Con- 
gress to aid slavery, and the Supreme Court dis- 
avowed legislative power to limit slavery ; the South 
invoked almost at the same moment congressional 
action and judicial limitation. 

Chase's dialectics were ingeniously applied in 
the many discussions from 1835 to 1862 on slav- 
ery in the District of Columbia. To deny to Con- 
gress all power to adopt the previous laws of 
Maryland and Virginia was farther than Chase 
dared go, since the land titles of the District rested 
on just such laws. He therefore set up a very 
subtle and technical distinction, to the effect that 
the old laws of Maryland ceased to have effect in 
the District when it was ceded, although " private 
rights " continued ; and that, since slavery was 
contrary to the Constitution, Congress could not 
reenact it. How hard put to it Chase was in this 
discussion is shown by his appeal to the clause in 
the preamble of the Constitution professing " to 
secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity." 
Such far-fetched arguments were of no service to 
the cause. A better line of attack would have been 
to urge that Congress had powers in the premises 
and should exercise them by emancipating the 
slaves in the District ; but Chase accepted the con- 






THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 71 

tradiction of declaring that the Acts of Congress 
establishing slavery in the District were void, and 
yet that Congress had power to repeal them. 

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 furnished a 
better opportunity for thorough and effective con- 
stitutional objections to slavery, and against it 
Chase appealed literally to earth and heaven. He 
held it to be contrary to the Ordinance of 1787, 
which provided for recovery only from "the 
original States ; " opposed to the intention of the 
fathers; and incompatible with the constitutional 
form of federal government. "When a slave 
leaves the jurisdiction of the State," said he, " he 
ceases to be a slave, because he continues to be a 
man and leaves behind him the law of force which 
made him a slave." The statute, argued Chase, 
makes no distinction between apprentices and 
slaves, and hence slaves have all the immunities of 
apprentices ; the details of the act are contrary to 
the letter and spirit of the Constitution, in denying 
" due process of law " and authorizing " unreason- 
able searches and seizures ; " the expectation of the 
Constitution was that States and not Congress 
should be responsible for the apprehension of 
fugitives; and, finally, "the legislature cannot 
authorize injustice by law, it cannot repeal the 
laws of nature, cannot create any obligation to do 
wrong, or neglect duty. No court is bound to 
enforce unjust laws." 

The appeal to fundamental principles of right 
and wrong, which could not be superseded by laws, 



72 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

however little it might convince a court, was the 
most effective of all the anti-slavery arguments, 
because it brought back the discussion to the 
absolute incongruity of democracy and slavery, 
and emphasized both the question of moral right 
and the social expediency of upholding the moral 
law. As Chase put it, slavery was nothing but a 
forcible denial of inborn and God-given rights, and 
hence it could not have even a legal status except 
by positive, unmistakable laws ; when these laws 
ceased, slavery ended. Yet in general Chase dwelt 
less on the wickedness of slavery in the sight of 
God, than on the iniquity of riveting it upon a 
free Constitution, meant for a free people ; and he 
made little use in his early arguments of the de- 
moralizing effect of slavery on freemen, though he 
wrote to O'Connell in 1843 : " We find also and 
we feel in our bitter experience that free labor is 
dishonored and its wages rendered insecure through- 
out the whole land by a system which exacts labor 
without wages and degrades the laborer to the level 
of the beast." 

Taking Chase's chain of arguments as a whole, 
it is easy to see defects : he was working on a the- 
ory not grounded on fact ; he argued that slavery 
could not possibly be covered by the Constitution, 
chiefly because it ought not to exist ; he assumed 
the moral wrong, without taking the trouble to 
prove it by a reference to the facts of slavery ; and 
he almost ignored the evil consequences of slavery 
to the slaveholder and to the white laborer. Yet 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 73 

of all the anti-slavery leaders Chase was perhaps 
the most practical in making his principles tell in 
concrete cases, in taking advantage of slips by the 
enemy, in unwearying effort to keep the question of 
slavery before the minds of his countrymen. Hun- 
dreds of men on both sides liked to make the Con- 
stitution a partner in their speeches ; hardly any 
other rendered such services as Chase in defending 
the victims of slavery who got across the line into 
the free States. Indeed, his skill, courage, and 
power of constitutional argument made it possible 
for him to render the second of his great services, — 
the defense of fugitive slaves. It was his courage as 
counsel in those cases, his use of all possible legal 
technicalities and expedients in behalf of his client, 
and his fearless and widely circulated speeches, 
which have made him best known as an anti- 
slavery man. 

In March, 1837, Chase was called in as counsel 
for an alleged fugitive, Matilda, the daughter and 
slave of a Missouri planter named Lawrence. She 
was so light in color that she easily passed for 
white, and her owner treated her as a favored 
personal attendant. She became clamorous for 
her freedom, and in May, 1836, while traveling 
down the Ohio on a steamer with him, she went 
ashore — with or without his knowledge — when 
the boat touched at Cincinnati. She speedily 
got employment as a servant in the house of the 
Birneys, who looked on her as a white woman ; but 
in March, 1837, she was seized by one Riley, in 



74 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

behalf of Lawrence, and brought before a magis- 
trate for his certificate that she was a fugitive. 
Chase, already the intimate friend of Birney, in- 
terposed with habeas corpus proceedings before a 
state court, and argued that she was a free person 
because she had been brought to the State of Ohio 
by her master, and therefore could not be " a per- 
son held to service or labor in one State, under the 
laws thereof, escaping into another." The judge 
decided against the claim of Matilda, and she was 
remanded into slavery. The poor girl was turned 
over to her captors, carried across the Ohio, and 
" sold down the river." 

To the pro-slavery men of Cincinnati this 
seemed an occasion to teach the abolitionists a 
lesson, and accordingly Birney was indicted for 
" harboring a slave." He had indeed known a few 
days before the capture that Matilda had been a 
bondwoman ; but Chase, as his counsel, again made 
the issue that a person brought to the State by a 
master thereby ceased to be a slave. Again the 
judge decided against Chase's contention; but 
Birney appealed, and the State Supreme Court 
reversed the decision. Unfortunately, its action 
was based on a technicality which Chase had care- 
fully avoided raising, and not on the bold principle 
of freedom under the laws of Ohio. Neverthe- 
less, the court took the unusual step of directing 
that Chase's argument be printed, apparently in 
order to bring his point to the attention of the 
profession. 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 75 

By far the most famous of the Ohio fugitive- 
slave cases was that of Van Zandt, for here was 
raised the question of punishing a rescuer. John 
Van Zandt, a Kentuckian turned abolitionist, had 
a small farm near Cincinnati, and was known to 
keep a station of the Underground Railroad. 
April 22, 1842, a party of nine slaves, the property 
of Wharton Jones of Kentucky, landed on the 
Ohio side of the river; and very early the next 
morning, as Van Zandt started from Walnut Hills 
to drive home, he found the party of negroes on 
the road. The testimony did not bring out just 
what influence led the fugitives from the river 
bank to a place which a known abolitionist was to 
pass ; at any rate, Van Zandt took the whole party 
into his covered wagon and proposed to carry them 
out of danger, and one of the slaves, Andrew, sat 
on the box and drove. About fifteen miles out of 
Cincinnati, they were stopped by persons whom 
Chase designated as " two bold villains," who, 
although they had no authority from the master or 
from any one else, simply carried off eight of the 
slaves and returned them to Kentucky ; the ninth, 
Andrew the driver, ran away, and never was seen 
again by his pursuers. Here again is an unex- 
plained mystery, on which light might be shed by 
some conductor of the Underground Railroad. 
The first legal result of the affair was the prosecu- 
tion of the " two bold villains " for abduction ; but 
the public prosecutor showed little interest ; and 
according to Chase they were " acquitted, more by 



76 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the public sentiment than by the jury who rendered 
the verdict of acquittal." 

The period was prolific in slavery suits. In 1838 
and 1839 came extradition proceedings, in which 
Governor Kent of Maine and Governor Seward of 
New York refused to surrender " slave stealers ; " 
in 1842 the Supreme Court decided the Prigg 
case, involving the seizure of a fugitive in Penn- 
sylvania without recourse to the courts ; and in the 
same year Wharton Jones, owner of the runaway 
slave Andrew, brought civil suit in the federal 
courts against Van Zandt, first to recover the value 
of Andrew and the expense of recapturing the 
others ; and, secondly, to recover the penalty of 
$500 allowed by the act of 1793 against a person 
who " after due notice harbored and concealed " a 
fugitive. Jones's first suit was defended by Chase 
and Thomas Morris with great zeal and skill ; but 
in the first trial, in July, 1842, Judge McLean held 
that Van Zandt' s evident knowledge of the charac- 
ter of the negroes was " due notice,'' and gave 
damages in $1200, which eventually had to be 
paid. The other suit for $500 penalty was also 
decided against Van Zandt, and appealed to the Su- 
preme Court. William H. Seward was now asso- 
ciated with Chase, — both serving without fee, — 
and in 1847 they submitted their arguments. The 
court sustained the decision of the lower court, and 
Van Zandt was mulcted $1700 and legal expenses 
for the offense of showing kindness to persons whom 
" he must have known " to be fugitives. 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 77 

None of Chase's legal arguments ever had such 
vogue as that presented in this case to the Supreme 
Court, but never orally delivered. Notwithstand- 
ing the careful courtesy of its language toward the 
Supreme Court, it is evident that he had not the 
slightest expectation of winning his case : what he 
aimed at was simply to put before the country a 
solemn protest against making the free States 
share in slavery. Justice Story said of his argu- 
ment, "It is a triumph of freedom ; " and the 
" Law Eeporter " ventured to predict that " his 
points will seriously influence the public mind and 
perhaps the politics of the country. " 

After an introduction, in which he ventures to 
remind the judges that several of them are them- 
selves slaveholders and therefore interested par- 
ties, Chase first attacks the averment against Van 
Zandt in its minutest specifications, but he speed- 
ily advances beyond technicalities, by claiming that 
the act of 1793 is defective and does not cover such 
a case as Van Zandt's ; and that it must be strictly 
construed as it stands. " Shall it be said," he ar- 
gues, " that public security is a less important end, 
than the right of a master to his slave ? . . . Will 
this court by construction attempt to supply these 
defects ? " He now calls into his service the Or- 
dinance of 1787, in his hands a kind of stage pro- 
perty which could do duty on all sorts of occasions. 
This time he makes it supersede the Federal Con- 
stitution, as an unamendable pre-agreement which 
provides only for the return of fugitives from " the 



78 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

original States," and relieves Ohio from any later 
fugitive slave law. 

Thus far Chase shows agility rather than wis- 
dom; but he now proceeds to weave a fabric of 
constitutional objections to the statute under 
which his client was prosecuted, namely, the Fugi- 
tive Slave Act of 1793. Here he is arguing 
against a stone wall ; for the Supreme Court had 
recently decided in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the 
act was for the most part constitutional, although 
the clauses requiring state magistrates to hold 
proceedings were void. Chase, however, has the 
confidence to assure the court that this decision 
was not unanimous, and was a dictum ; and then 
he uses his favorite argument that the Constitu- 
tion has nothing to do with slavery, except in 
States where it is established by state law, and 
that hence of course there is no constitutional au- 
thority possible for a fugitive slave act. 

The advocate now becomes more definite, and 
argues specifically that Congress can under no cir- 
cumstances legislate on the return of fugitives; 
that what the clause of the Constitution establishes 
both for fugitive slaves and fugitive criminals is 
only "a treaty obligation — a covenant or com- 
pact." Elsewhere in the argument Chase goes 
even further, by the bold assertion that there can 
be no possible way of giving to one of the parties 
in a controversy the right to seize the other and to 
claim a decision on ex parte evidence. " What is 
that," says he, " but to legalize assault and battery 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 79 

and private imprisonment? I say fearlessly that 
such acts of legislation as this are subversive of 
the fundamental principles on which all civil soci- 
ety rests." 

Chase closes with a calm but eloquent prediction, 
which might have given pause to a court then on 
the road to the Dred Scott decision : " Upon ques- 
tions such as some of these involved in this case, 
which partakes largely of a moral and political 
nature, the judgment, even of this court, must 
necessarily be rejudged at the tribunal of public 
opinion, the opinion, not of the American people 
only, but of the civilized world." 

The importance of the whole argument does not 
lie in its constitutional cogency or in its effect on 
the government. Chase ventured to refer to few 
decisions, for both law and practice were against 
him ; his doctrine was unacceptable to the Supreme 
Court, and was rudely ignored by Congress three 
years later, when a more obnoxious fugitive slave 
law replaced that of which Chase complained. 
The real significance of the Yan Zandt argument 
is the passionate protest against making free men 
and free States responsible for slavery, even though 
the Constitution, statutes, and practice so bound 
them. The moral reasons which Chase put for- 
ward applied not only to the fugitive slave law, but 
also to legislation for the District of Columbia and 
to the organization of new Territories acquired in 
1846 ; and in the struggle over the Wilmot Proviso 
such arguments as he used nerved the abolitionists 



80 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

to fight to the bitter end against slavery in the Ter- 
ritories. 

Between 1845 and 1849 Chase was involved in 
several other fugitive cases. A slave named Sam- 
uel Watson, in January, 1845, went on shore 
from a steamer lying at the landing in Cincinnati. 
By habeas corpus Chase brought the case before 
the Ohio Supreme Court, laying stress on the point 
that, as the escape was made within the low-water 
mark, it was undoubtedly in Ohio territory. Judge 
Read, however, decided that a steamer navigating 
the waters of the Ohio was, so far as slavery was 
concerned, within the jurisdiction of the southern 
shore, though he showed a deference to rising pub- 
lic sentiment by saying : " Slavery is a wrong in- 
flicted by force and supported alone by the muni- 
cipal power of the State or Territory where it 
exists ; . . , . the master must lose his slave if he 
brings him into a free State." Nevertheless the 
abolitionists remembered only that Judge Read 
had returned Watson to slavery, and in 1849 used 
their balance of power to drop him from the 
court. 

Another case in 1845 was that of Francis D. 
Parish of Sandusky, charged with " harboring and 
concealing " a slave woman and her child, and also 
with " obstructing " the legal owners of a slave by 
refusing to permit the arrest of the two negroes 
under a power of attorney from the alleged owner. 
In spite of Chase's efforts as counsel, Parish 
was convicted and had to pay a fine of a thousand 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 81 

dollars. One of the jurymen afterward wrote to 
Chase : "I pray God to hasten the day when law 
such as we as a jury are called upon to apply may 
be repealed." 

Although Chase was defeated in every one of the 
slave cases in which he appeared for the defense, 
a natural result of his zealous efforts was to make 
him the friend and counselor of distressed colored 
people both in Cincinnati and far and wide through- 
out the country. A few examples of the strange 
relations into which his reputation brought him 
will throw light on the whole institution of slav- 
ery. In 1840 one John Martin, a Georgia planter, 
writes pathetically in behalf of three mulatto chil- 
dren whom he has sent to Ohio to be emancipated, 
— the too familiar case of a father seeking to get 
his own flesh and blood out of bondage. "You 
will confer a great favor on an unfortunate man 
to select good homes for them," he says ; and he 
begs that one of the girls may be taken by Mrs. 
Chase as a house servant. In March, 1841, Mary 
Townsend writes in a beautiful hand from Oberlin, 
asking Chase to learn what her former master will 
take for free papers for herself, and for three boys 
left in Kentucky. In September, 1841, R. G. 
Corwin submits the case of Daniel Washington, 
slave of Amos Kendall, who was sent South to be 
sold to pay some of Kendall's debts, but came 
ashore from a steamer lying at Cincinnati. Corwin 
declares that " there can be no doubt that he is as 
free as the God who made him," and proposes to 



82 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

send him to Canada. In 1844 Benjamin Stanton 
writes from Iowa : " I think I heard thee express a 
desire to get a case to test the constitutionality of 
slavery," and gives details of such a case. 

In July, 1845, Chase's legal advice is asked in 
the case of "The State of Ohio for the use of the 
Poor of Washington Township, Preble County, 
on complaint of George Wagoner v. H. Monfort" 
Monfort had been fined for employing a negro 
woman, who had not given bond that she would 
not become a public charge. In March, 1846, 
Chase is called upon in behalf of Jerry Finney, 
who had been kidnapped at Columbus. " I know," 
writes his correspondent, " I need not invoke your 
aid in this matter, always being found ready to 
assist and protect the poor African." In April, 
1848, a gentleman from Vicksburg asks Chase how 
manumission may be obtained in a free State for a 
family for which the negro mother has purchased 
freedom at an expense of over five thousand dol- 
lars. In view of these and other instances, it is 
no wonder that Chase was called the "attorney- 
general of fugitive slaves." 

The colored people of Cincinnati showed their 
gratitude for his defense of Watson in 1845 by 
presenting to him a silver pitcher ; his enemies 
made much capital out of this selection as the spe- 
cial friend of " the nigger," and more out of his 
speech to the donors, in which he boldly stated 
the extremest abolition doctrine of negro suffrage 
twenty years before any political party would take 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 83 

it up. " I regard," said he, " the exclusion of the 
colored people as a body from the elective fran- 
chise as incompatible with true democratic princi- 
ples." The pitcher had an interesting history. 
Later, when Chase was governor of Ohio, he used 
it as a kind of official punch-bowl for lemonade, 
to the wrath of extreme Democrats and moderate 
drinkers ; and eventually it became an heirloom, 
treasured for its associations with his anti-slavery 
career. 

Of more importance to Chase's political future 
was his position as a kind of Western anti-slavery 
oracle. During the period from 1840 to 1849 he 
was in correspondence with most of the Western 
and Southern abolitionists. W. Aldam, Jr., an 
Englishman, furnished him material on slavery in 
the West Indies; students of Lane Seminary in 
1843 thanked him for his statement to them of his 
views on slavery ; John Jay began a correspond- 
ence which lasted for many years. In 1844 John 
G. Fee and Edgar Needham of Kentucky wrote to 
him describing their anti-slavery efforts, and from 
time to time thereafter they reported to him. Fee 
was a minister, the son of a slaveholder, and one 
of the sturdy native abolitionists who held their 
ground in their own State ; later he founded Berea 
College, a kind of Kentucky Oberlin, where blacks 
and whites since the Civil War have been educated 
together. That Chase, the cold New Englander, 
should be the friend, adviser, and confidant of 
such men as Birney, Fee, and Needham, shows the 



84 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

confidence which had been inspired by his fearless 
efforts to give the negro his legal rights and to 
defend the friends of the slave. From this time 
to the Civil War, he was one of the men upon 
whom the abolition fraternity called for advice and 
assistance. 

With all his reputation and all his friends, 
Chase was in many respects a lonely man in Cin- 
cinnati. His fugitive slave cases brought fame, 
but no fees and no paying clients ; and when Bir- 
ney and Bailey left Cincinnati he had no abolition- 
ist intimate of strength and character in whom he 
confided. It is easy to look back through his life 
and see what advantages at last came to him 
through his steadfastness in this dark period ; but 
at the time he was doing an unpopular service to 
humanity. 

From 1840 to 1849 Chase led a kind of triple 
life : he had his private and professional interests ; 
he had his anti-slavery pursuits ; and he had also 
the great political task of organizing the Liberty 
and Free-Soil parties. Anti-slavery now began to 
play a part in Ohio politics ; long before 1840 a 
few men in important offices had not been afraid 
to be known as anti-slavery men ; such were Leices- 
ter King, president of the Ohio Anti-slavery Soci- 
ety, in the state Senate from 1833 to 1838 ; Benja- 
min F. Wade, a Whig, also in the state Senate 
from 1835 to 1839 ; Joshua R. Giddings, at first a 
Whig, then abolitionist member of the national 
House of Representatives from 1838 to 1861 ; and 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 85 

Thomas Morris, United States senator from 1833 
to 1839. 

For the formation of a distinct anti-slavery party 
in Ohio, and for the first national organization, two 
men are chiefly responsible, James G. Birney and 
Salmon P. Chase. The Garrisonian principh 
non-participation never had much influei 
Ohio, where all the abolitionist leaders contini! 
to vote at every election and had a keen sense of 
what might be done by a proper concentration of 
ballots ; but they were not always agreed as to 
which to choose out of three possible courses : 
whether to vote only for candidates who were of 
their regular party, but were against slavery; to 
throw their votes from one side to the other, ac- 
cording as this or that party put up an anti-slavery 
man ; or to form a third party. 

The first of these methods was suggested by Bir- 
ney in the Ohio anti-slavery convention of 1835, 
when he wanted the " elevated principles of holi- 
ness " applied to politics, and proposed a pledge 
that abolitionists should vote for no candidate who 
was not against the Black Laws. Nevertheless, 
even such decided abolitionists as the Oberlin peo- 
ple continued to vote the Whig ticket at election 
after election. 

Birney could not stand still in his conception of 
political abolitionism. In September, 1836, his 
paper, the "Philanthropist," urged abolitionists 
not to unite with either of the great parties. The 
local anti-slavery societies began to take up the 



86 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

idea in their conventions, and in 1837 the state 
society voted : " That it is time for the abolitionists 
of Ohio to relinquish all party attachments, and 
act with a single view to the supremacy of the law, 
the inviolability of constitutional privileges, and 
the rights of all." For a time the anti-slavery 
men contented themselves with questioning candi- 
dates as to their principles on slavery ; but this 
method broke down in 1838, when the abolitionists 
destroyed the Whig supremacy in the legislature 
by voting for pledged Democrats, only to see the 
pledges ignored and to witness the passage of a 
scandalous state fugitive slave act. 

The natural result was a general movement 
toward a third-party organization, and in 1839 
one member of the legislature was elected as an 
avowed separatist from both parties. Meanwhile 
similar movements were taking place in other 
States; and in 1840 the political abolitionists in 
the American Anti-slavery Society broke away 
from the Garrisonians, and through an informal 
national organization nominated James G. Birney 
for the presidency, as the candidate of the Liberty 
party. 

Up to 1840 Chase had little to do with politics, 
though a delegate to the National Republican con- 
vention which nominated Clay in 1832. When 
the election of 1836 drew on, he was a Whig, and 
urged the nomination of Judge McLean; but he 
knew General Harrison, who lived near Cincinnati, 
and finally, with some qualms, voted for him. In 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 87 

1840 he showed no sympathy when his friend Bir- 
ney, as the head of the new Liberty party, called 
out the political anti-slavery forces. He remained 
a regular Whig, and a second time supported Har- 
rison in the hope that his candidate would loolc 
more kindly than Van Buren on the efforts against 
slavery in the District of Columbia. The result 
of the campaign was the election of Harrison, while 
the Liberty movement proved pitifully weak ; out 
of 1,500,000 votes Birney got only 7000, in his 
own State of Ohio polling only 903 out of a total 
of 274,000. 

Thus in November, 1840, Chase was still a 
Whig ; but in May, 1841, he took an active part V 
in the county convention of the Liberty men in 
Cincinnati. Since this was the first political crisis 
in his life, his motives deserve critical examina- 
tion. Schuckers, who got a strong impression from 
Chase himself, accounts for the change simply by 
saying that the Birney movement " did express a 
conviction that some form of organization against 
slavery had become a political necessity," and 
" in that conviction Mr. Chase now joined ; " but 
Schuckers also intimates that Chase looked to see 
an anti-slavery Democratic president in 1844, and 
hence he leaves unexplained the union with the 
Liberty men. Pierce, in his unpublished memoir 
(inspired by Chase), lays Chase's change of front 
to his studies into the aggressions of slavery, and 
to his dissatisfaction with the obtuseness of Harri- 
son and Tyler ; but Chase had as yet not worked 



88 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

out his constitutional theory, and in 1840-41 showed 
little dissatisfaction with Harrison. Hoadly, in 
his memorial address, says : " I learn from Hon. 
Kufus King, who was then a law student in his 
office, that Mr. Chase was a candidate for the 
\ hig nomination for state senator, and was de- 
feated in the nominating convention principally at 
the instigation of his brother-in-law, H. H. South- 
gate, upon the avowed and open ground that he 
was an abolitionist. How notice could have been 
more distinctly given to Chase that there was no 
place in the Whig party of Ohio for him or his 
principles, I fail to see." This theory might have 
accounted for a bolt in 1840, but hardly for one in 
1841, after the election of Chase's candidate for 
the presidency. 

Chase himself has left several different state- 
ments of his motives. In a letter to Charles 
Sumner of March 9, 1849, he says : " In 1840 I 
supported General Harrison, though I then favored 
the sub-treasury system rather than a bank of the 
United States. I supported him because I ima- 
gined that his administration would be less pro- 
slavery than Mr. Van Buren's. As soon as I dis- 
covered my mistake, I was ready to concur in an 
independent movement, and was one of the first 
who took an active part in organizing the Liberty 
party in Ohio." Much later, in 1868, he wrote : 
" I was not a life-long "Whig, but a sort of inde- 
pendent Whig, with Democratic ideas, from 1830 
to 1841. Sometimes I voted for a Democrat, but 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 89 

more generally for Whigs." These explanations 
are doubtless sincere, but they do not cover the 
whole ground; for when Tyler succeeded to the 
presidency in 1841, nobody dreamed that he was 
about to disrupt the Whig party. Moreover the 
anti-slavery Whigs in Ohio at that time were by 
far the largest body of anti-slavery men in the 
State ; in leaving them, Chase went into a small 
and feeble party. 

The real reason for Chase's change of front may 
safely be inferred from some scattered and appar- 
ently disconnected facts. During the campaign of 

1840 Harrison said that " he would as soon ap- 
point an abolitionist to office as anybody else, if 
qualified," and he chose Chase to go to Bailey, 
editor of the "Philanthropist," and expostulate 
with him for his criticisms. Numbers of office- 
seekers supposed Chase to be deep in Harrison's 
confidence and asked his indorsement. Early in 

1841 Chase took part in a meeting at Cincinnati 
which urged Harrison to discountenance slavery 
in the District of Columbia, and he felt himself 
in a position to justify a letter to Harrison two 
weeks before his inauguration, urging him not to 
favor slavery in his inaugural. Harrison wrote 
civilly in reply, but his inaugural took ground 
against any interference with slavery, and the slen- 
der hopes based upon him were shattered by his 
death, in April, 1841. A month later Chase had 
forever left the Whig party, and had cast in his 
lot with Birney and Bailey, with the Oberlin aboli- 



90 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

tionists, with the Western Keserve supporters of 
Giddings. 

It is plain that Chase held to the Whig party 
up to 1841 on the chance of being able to exert a 
personal influence over Harrison. So far as the 
Whig " principles " were concerned, Chase had 
come to see that the old Jacksonian issues of the 
bank and the tariff were moribund, and hence his 
natural sympathies were with the Democrats ; but 
that party in Ohio in 1840 enacted a state fugitive 
slave law at the demand of the government of Ken- 
tucky. As a member of either regular party Chase 
must vote for and with active pro-slavery men, and 
hence he sought other alliances. His change of 
party was a distinct sacrifice of his material inter- 
ests, for most of the respectable people in Cincin- 
nati were Whigs, and the Liberty party was very 
feeble and discouraged. Chase reluctantly followed 
his convictions by throwing in his lot with an un- 
popular set of men engaged in what seemed a hope- 
less crusade. 

From this time to the election of 1860, Chase 
preserved an undying distrust and hatred of the 
Whig party, and often of Whigs as individuals. 
"It is a party of expediency and compromise," 
he said in 1843 ; " every vote for a Whig is a vote 
against abolition." Seward in 1845 sent him a 
letter of protest at his bitterness against his former 
associates, but in 1850 Chase still made the con- 
fident assertion that the Whigs were really pro- 
slavery. On the other hand, he always believed 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 91 

that by a proper pressure the Democratic party- 
might be brought to take up the anti-slavery 
cause. 

The accession of Chase was a great joy to the 
Liberty men, for hitherto they had been weak in 
the southern part of the State, and had lacked 
tacticians. At once he was seized upon for tasks 
in which he showed great skill : he could write in- 
spiring addresses ; he could organize conventions 
and get them to do their work in his way ; it was 
his vigor and snap which made the Ohio Liberty 
party the most efficient of the political abolitionist 
organizations in the whole country during the next 
six years. Issues were plenty : the Ohio Black 
Laws, which had so far stood against all attacks ; 
the right of petition to Congress; slavery in the 
District of Columbia ; the slave trade ; fugitive 
slaves and kidnapping; after 1842 the Texas ques- 
tion ; and after 1846 the territorial question and 
the Wilmot Proviso. 

"Within a year after his conversion Chase had 
become practically the leader of the Liberty party 
in Ohio, and for eight years he continued his 
work of organizing conventions, preparing party 
addresses, bolstering up the Liberty press, and com- 
forting distressed brethren, with the result that 
the party had an encouraging growth within its 
small limits. In the state Liberty convention of 
1841 Chase was very active, writing at this time 
the first of his remarkable " Addresses." It was 
a preliminary statement of the doctrine afterward 



92 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

worked out in the Van Zandt arguments o£ 1847, 
namely, the absolute disassociation of the Constitu- 
tion from slavery except as States might create the 
system ; and it led up to a climax in the often 
quoted sentence: "The honor, the welfare, the 
safety of our country imperiously require the abso- 
lute and unqualified divorce of the government from 
slavery." 

By 1842 the question of the attitude of the Lib- 
erty men in the presidential election of 1844 came 
up, and Chase saw opening before him an attrac- 
tive field of influence in the choice of a national 
Liberty candidate. Nearly three years before the 
election Birney wrote to Chase, protesting against 
the suggested nomination of Governor Seward un- 
til he should become " an abolitionist in name," or 
of John Quincy Adams, " who," says Birney, " looks 
on the doctrine of immediate emancipation as held 
by our friends as ridiculous." In the national 
Liberty convention at Buffalo in 1843, Birney was 
again nominated for the presidency ; but the con- 
vention was carried away by one of those cyclones 
of radicalism which gave such delight to the 
enemies of the abolitionists, and against Chase's 
protest it was voted that the fugitive slave 
clause of the Constitution might be excepted by a 
mental reservation in taking oath to the Constitu- 
tion. 

The paramount issue in the campaign of 1844 
was the annexation of Texas. Van Buren was re- 
placed as the Democratic candidate by Polk, an 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 93 

ardent annexationist, on an annexation platform. 
Clay received the Whig nomination, but under the 
pressure of the campaign wrote letters to reassure 
the Southern wing of the party, thereby alien- 
ating some thousands of anti-slavery Whigs. This 
was the opportunity of the Liberty men, who alone 
stood for uncompromising opposition to the admis- 
sion of slave territory, and they joyfully received 
the bolting Whigs. Nevertheless, Birney's total 
vote was but 62,000. 

Certain charges against Birney no doubt much 
cut down the Liberty vote in Ohio, which had risen 
from 900 in 1840 to 2800 in 1841, to 5400 in 
1842, and to 7000 in 1843 ; but which, in all the 
excitement of the presidential year, 1844, was but 
8000. In the pivotal State of New York, however, 
the Liberty vote, chiefly withdrawn from the Whig 
party, was more than enough to turn the scale 
against Clay ; and the result was the transfer of 
that State, and thus of the electoral majority, from 
the Whig to the Democratic column. 

Then and since, this use of the balance of power 
has been laid against the Liberty men as a great 
error of judgment, on the ground that within four 
months after the election Texas was annexed. But 
it was never the political object of the third-party 
men to put into office men or parties moderately 
favorable to themselves : what they desired was to 
impress the country with their determination to 
accept nothing but the "denationalization of sla- 
very." Of the Polk Democracy most of them were 



94 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

hopeless : they saw that the party could not be in- 
clined to their cause whether they voted with it or 
against it. The Clay Whigs, on the other hand, 
were supposed to be more friendly to anti-slavery, 
and for that very reason might perhaps be coerced 
into the principles of the Liberty party, if other- 
wise they must be beaten. Such was the argument 
of the Liberty men, and it took ten years to con- 
vince them that neither of the great national par- 
ties would ever take ground which involved the loss 
of all its Southern following. 

The opportunity for a political anti-slavery party 
seemed at last to have come ; in 1845 Texas was 
annexed ; in 1846 the Wilmot Proviso came up ; 
in 1847 was the culmination of the Mexican war ; 
yet the vitality of the Liberty party in Ohio was 
so nearly exhausted that in 1845 its vote fell to 
7000, and though in 1846, on the local issue of the 
repeal of the Black Laws, it ran up to 11,000, yet 
in 1847 there was not even a state convention, and 
only about 4000 votes were polled. Chase himself 
was profoundly discouraged, and wrote to John P. 
Hale in April, 1847 : " I see no prospect of greater 
future progress, but rather of less. As fast as 
we can bring public sentiment right, the other par- 
ties will approach our ground. To build up a 
new party is by no means so easy as to compel old 
parties to do a particular work. ... If we can 
once get the Democratic party in motion, regard- 
ing the overthrow of slavery as a legitimate and 
necessary result of its principles, I would have no 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 95 

apprehensions at all of the work being laid aside 
until accomplished." 

During 1847 the Liberty men took the field for 
the campaign of 1848, on the old straight issue. 
Birney was now out of public life, through the 
effects of a physical accident, and Chase's corre- 
spondence is full of a manager's talk about candi- 
dates. In January he sounds Judge McLean on 
accepting a nomination; in March a New York 
abolitionist suggests Seward; in May Chase pro- 
poses Judge John C. Wright of Ohio ; in June the 
chairman of the New York Liberty state commit- 
tee suggests " Gerrit Smith and Salmon P. Chase " 
as the ticket, and Chase replies that he would vote 
for Smith ; in August H. B. Stanton reports that 
a committee has waited on John P. Hale of New 
Hampshire, and that "he is with the Liberty 
party in principles, reasons, and feelings." 

Out of all the candidates suggested, Hale was 
the most available. In 1846 he was elected to the 
Senate as an independent anti-slavery man, though 
of Democratic antecedents ; he was distinguished 
for his keen and caustic rhetoric and absolute fear- 
lessness. Chase, however, was more alive than his 
associates to the signs of the times : the question 
of slavery in the annexed territory must come be- 
fore the next Congress, and he had strong hopes 
that the Democratic party would take such ground 
as would enable the Liberty men to unite with 
them. He therefore urged the postponement of 
the Liberty convention to the spring of 1848, but 



\ 



96 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

he was overruled, and the convention met at Buf- 
falo in October, 1847. Chase was a delegate, and 
declined a nomination as vice-president on the ticket 
with John P. Hale, the nominee of the convention. 

The division of feeling among Liberty men was 
ominous. In the spring of 1848, Chase took the 
responsibility of setting a back fire against his own 
party by manipulating a shrewd call, signed by 
three thousand disaffected Whigs and Democrats, 
for an " Ohio Mass Free-Territory Convention," to 
meet after the nominating conventions of the two 
regular parties. Meanwhile he was writing right 
and left to urge the suppression of the national 
Liberty ticket, even personally urging Hale to 
withdraw, on the chance of being nominated again. 

When the Whig national convention in May 
nominated Taylor, a slaveholder on a no-platform 
platform, and the Democratic convention in June 
nominated Cass, a Northern dough-face, especially 
hateful to the Liberty men, many Whig and 
Democratic politicians and newspapers could stand 
neither nomination. In New York the anti-slav- 
ery wing of the Democrats — the Barnburners — 
bolted solidly under the leadership of their chief- 
tain, ex-President Van Buren ; and it was evident 
that a union of all anti-slavery men would again 
hold the balance of power in the campaign and 
might carry some States. 

In forming such a union no man had a more 
arduous or a more honorable part than Chase. 
The apparently spontaneous Ohio mass convention 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 97 

of June 21, 1848, was really skillfully engineered 
by him and his friends ; a thousand delegates en- 
thusiastically attended ; Chase spoke ; Chase wrote 
the admirable resolutions ; Chase prepared the 
addresses ; Chase secured the call for a national 
Free - Soil convention ; yet Chase as a Liberty 
leader kept in the background. On the same day 
and at the same place the Ohio Liberty convention 
met and formally dissolved the party by accepting 
the proposed Buffalo Convention. 

For seven years Chase had been the leading 
manager of the Liberty party in the Northwest ; he 
knew the men ; he prepared the official addresses ; 
he kept in touch with the newspapers. For the 
second time in his life he had left his party, 
though it had a nominee before the country. In 
his own mind, and in fact, his principles were un- 
changed, but he had found a new way of expressing 
them : he was working now to establish a new kind 
of organization, an " anti-slavery league," in which 
all the anti-slavery men in the country should re- 
fuse to vote for pro-slavery men. He had no con- 
fidence in the Whig party, and in June, 1847, had 
expressed the belief that the Democracy would " be 
compelled to take substantially the ground of the 
Liberty party." It is plain that in the Barnburner 
bolt he welcomed what he considered the evidence 
of the long-desired purifying of the Democratic 
conscience. He would, however, have left the Lib- 
erty organization even if the Barnburners had re- 
mained with the Democrats, for he saw no hope 



98 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

in third-party methods ; a reorganization of the 
friends of freedom, and a widening of their basis 
of action, seemed to him essential. 

With the call of the Buffalo Convention the 
name " Liberty party " disappeared and was never 
renewed. The term " Free-Soil " implied a nar- 
rower issue, for it meant at the moment no more 
than the Wilmot Proviso, and thousands of Liberty 
men hesitated to give up their full principles and 
their identity in order to go into a new organiza- 
tion. But the foundations of the great deep were 
breaking up; the public sentiment of the North 
seemed now overwhelmingly in favor of the Wil- 
mot Proviso, though it had been repudiated by 
both the regular parties; and the obvious course 
was to give the popular protest an opportunity to 
crystallize in votes. 

During July, 1848, delegates to the Buffalo Con- 
vention were elected in all the Northern States, 
and in Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland ; and in 
the six available weeks men from all over the 
country asked Chase's counsel as to the platform 
and the candidates. As an old Whig, long a Lib- 
erty man, inclined to a free Democracy, Chase 
formed a centre for the Western delegates. He 
was also the friend and correspondent of many of 
the New York and Eastern men, especially of H. 
B. Stanton and Charles Sumner, and he was cer- 
tain to be a power in the convention. He had for 
months suggested Judge McLean, uncle of the 
wife whom he had recently married ; but he avoided 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 99 

committing himself to any candidate, and expressed 
a willingness to accept Hale if the convention nom- 
inated him. 

No national political convention in the United 
States ever seemed so spontaneous and so un- 
fettered as the assemblage at Buffalo on August 
9-10, 1848. An immense concourse of voluntary- 
delegates appeared ; as the long-suffering reporter 
said, " men seemed to think that because they were 
Free-Soilers and had ' left home to come up here,' 
they had a perfect right to take possession of any 
position, place, or seat they might choose." Within 
this unwieldy mass of attendants was a large num- 
ber of accredited delegates irregularly sent from 
sixteen States ; out of these a so-called " Commit- 
tee of Conference " was organized, made up of 465 
members, and this was the real nominating conven- 
tion ; within this body again was a " Committee of 
Eesolutions " of 48 members. While the" Con- 
ference " balloted, the large so-called "Conven- 
tion " amused itself with stump speeches made by 
all sorts of people, from Joshua R. Giddings to 
"Mr. Bibb, a colored fugitive." The life and 
energy of the gathering are set forth in recent 
reminiscences of Dr. Albert Gaillard Hart, a dele- 
gate from Ohio. 

" I can hardly recall any public gathering where 
the enthusiasm was so universal and unbounded. 
Every reference to the determination to stop the 
aggressiveness of slavery, and to move steadily for- 
ward to its overthrow, was met by the loudest 



100 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

response which thousands of throats could offer. 
On the second day in the afternoon the nomination 
convention, of which I was a member, met in a 
Universalist church, not far from the convention. 
Here Judge Chase presided. I recall perfectly his 
dignified and impressive bearing, his candor and 
fairness in presiding. Benjamin F. Butler of New 
York State, regarded as Mr. Van Buren's first 
lieutenant, made an adroit and eloquent speech in 
favor of the nomination of Van Buren. Knowing 
full well the determination of the North that slav- 
ery should be abolished in the District of Colum- 
bia, and as well that Van Buren had repeatedly 
declared that it could not be done without the con- 
sent of the South, he in that part of his speech 
exclaimed, ' and if the South refuses to consent to 
the abolishment of slavery in the District of Co- 
lumbia, then we will remove the seat of government 
to the bright banks of the Ohio.' The anti-slavery 
men could easily carry the nomination. But here 
was a host of young, eager, enthusiastic men, 
ready and anxious to enlist under our banners. 
We might make the platform, only let them bring 
with them their old and beloved leader, who, 
though seventy-four years of age, had much of 
the fire of youth, and would in time come up to 
our standards. We knew perfectly that he and 
the 'Barnburners' were only anxious to 'beat 
Cass' and the Baltimore Convention, and that they 
had no hearty hatred of slavery. John P. Hale 
was the logical candidate of the old guard. But 



THE POLITICAL ABOLITIONIST 101 

enough delegates thought it best to act upon the 
hope that once with us they would continue to be 
our allies in the future, and so Van Buren was 
nominated. At the ratification meeting of the 
general convention held that night, one of the 
speakers, a Barnburner, quoted : — 

" ' Now is the winter of our discontent 

Made glorious summer by this sun of York, 
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house 
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.' 

" Free-Soilers and Barnburners, — few after 
fifty years survive. But of those still living none 
can fail to recall the fiery wave of enthusiasm and 
the roar of cheering voices when the Committee on 
Resolutions read last : ' That we inscribe on our 
banner " Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and 
Free Men," and under it will fight on and fight 
ever until a triumphant victory shall reward our 
exertions.' " 

In all the work of the Buffalo Convention Chase 
was the leading spirit ; he drafted the strong reso- 
lutions, the spirit of which was summed up in the 
phrase, " No more slave States and no more slave 
territory ; " and he added planks advocating na- 
tional improvements, homestead land grants, and 
a tariff for revenue. To Chase's influence also is 
due the choice of Van Buren as a candidate ; for 
he early came to an understanding with the New 
York men that they might name the candidate if 
the Liberty party might frame the platform. Chase 
probably was no more confident than any one else 



102 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

of Van Buren 's change of heart, but he had made 
a practical combination, which he pressed forward 
in a strong canvass. Hale withdrew, and most of 
the state Liberty organizations were dropped ; but 
old Whigs, who had fought Van Buren from 1828 
to 1844, found it hard to vote for him. Chase did 
not speak outside of the Ohio districts, but for the 
first time an effort was made to reach the Germans, 
through documents and speeches in their language. 
The election showed only 300,000 votes for Van 
Buren, and of these 120,000 were in New York. 
The Free-Soil vote in Ohio was 35,000, the high- 
water mark of the third-party movement up to 
1853. Perhaps because of this vote Cass carried 
Ohio, and nothing but the Barnburner defection 
caused him to lose New York; the third party had 
apparently succeeded only in electing a slave- 
holder. In the very close state election in Ohio, 
however, the Free-Soilers had eleven members of 
the state legislature, and enjoyed the balance of 
power for the choice of a United States senator. 
Perhaps Chase had this result in mind when he 
wrote to Charles Sumner in November, 1848, 
apropos of the Buffalo platform : " I should not be 
greatly surprised if the coming winter should wit- 
ness a union between the old Democracy and the 
Free Democracy in our legislature upon the princi- 
ples of that platform." 



CHAPTER V 

THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 

As the smoke cleared away from the field of 
1848, it became possible to see how changed was 
the status of the anti-slavery movement. The old 
abolition societies and press had been losing vital- 
ity ever since 1841. Their great mission had been 
to compel the Aanerican people to think about 
slavery ; and all the assaults upon them had only 
brought out more clearly the fact that slavery and 
free speech could not exist in the same communities, 
and hardly in the same federation. They could 
not stave off the annexation of Texas, a question 
which presented an issue far short of abolition, 
but at the same time created anti-slavery allies 
for the time being among Northern legislators and 
party agents. Since 1820 not a foot of land had 
been redeemed from the curse of slavery ; while a 
small fraction of the present Missouri and all of 
Texas had come under it. The fierce contest over 
the Wilmot Proviso, from 1846 to 1850, showed 
that anti-slavery was put on the defensive, and that, 
so far from " securing immediate abolition " in the 
slave-holding States, the system of slavery was ex- 
tending into additional regions formerly free. Even 



104 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the political abolitionists had in 1848 given up the 
sweeping Liberty platform, and had accepted the 
issue of Free-Soil as the utmost for which they 
would at that moment contend. 

Chase was one of the leaders who saw most dis- 
tinctly that the slave power was advancing, and 
one of his objects in furthering a coalition with the 
Barnburners was to put a pressure upon Congress 
to stand by the Wilmot Proviso ; and the plain and 
predominant purpose of the Free-Soil coalition was, 
in his mind, to alarm the Democratic party. He 
supposed also that the Barnburners would stand 
out till their faction had forced the Democratic 
party to come over to its ground and thus to be- 
come the party of liberty. 

The union of Free-Soilers and Democrats had 
elected no President. Could it be effective in other 
contests, — for example, in the choice of a senator 
from Ohio to succeed William Allen ? That con- 
test included many complications, but came down 
to this result : Chase's friends voted to admit to 
the legislature two contested Democrats, on condi- 
tions that the Black Laws be repealed ; and by the 
aid of those two votes Chase was elected senator. 
Chase's part in this episode has been a subject of 
much controversy; and the senatorial election of 
1849 must therefore be studied in its details. 

The first element in the struggle was the " Hamil- 
ton County election." A Whig partisan apportion- 
ment act of 1848 had for the first time in the his- 
tory of the State divided a county into electoral 



THE. ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 105 

districts ; the object being to secure two of the five 
Hamilton County (Cincinnati) delegates, who had 
hitherto been all Democrats. 

In the election of 1848 the Democrats in Hamil- 
ton County refused to recognize the statute, though 
all the other districts in the State had availed 
themselves of it. Instead they nominated and 
voted for five candidates as before, all of whom 
were declared elected by the Democratic county 
clerk. But the Whigs in their new district had a 
majority for two candidates, who contested the 
seats of Pugh and Pierce, Democrats. It fell out 
that the state election was very close ; the Whig 
candidate for governor had 148,666 votes against 
148,321 for his opponent, and the legislature was 
not controlled by either regular party; while to 
organize the House the two disputed votes from 
Hamilton County were necessary. In the House 
of 72 members the returns were as follows: 
Straight Democrats, 32 ; straight Whigs, 30 ; 
Free-Soilers, 8; contested seats, 2; but when it 
came to the delicate questions of organization and 
the choice of a senator, the Free-Soilers broke up 
into 5 Whig Free-Soilers, 1 Democratic Free-Soiler 
(who eventually voted with his Whig brethren 
against Chase), and 2 Independent Free-Soilers 
(Townshend and Morse). The Whigs, with the 
Whig Free-Soilers and their 2 Hamilton County 
contestants, could make the 37 necessary for a 
quorum; but the straight Democrats, even with 
Pugh and Pierce and the Democratic Free-Soiler, 
were at: the start 2 short of the quorum of 37. 



106 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

In the confused state of the membership, nobody 
could predict who would form a combination capa- 
ble of organizing the House and of passing on the 
contested seats. The Democrats, therefore, formed 
and executed the bold plan of " rushing " the 
lower House, by coming together unexpectedly just 
before the regular time of meeting, and hastily 
swearing in Pugh and Pierce and three straw con- 
testants, thus making 37 members ; they then pro- 
ceeded to elect officers. The Whigs swarmed in a 
few moments later, swore in their two contestants 
from Hamilton County, and organized a House in 
like irregular fashion on the other side of the room. 
Day after day, from December 4 to December 26, 
the two bodies harangued and voted and skir- 
mished side by side. When the contest was all 
over, Chase wrote to Charles Sumner the following 
account of the breaking of the deadlock and its 
results : — 

" These opposing claims, and the bitterness grow- 
ing out of the great question, led to scenes which 
marked the opening of the session, and I do not 
doubt would have occasioned the dissolution of the 
legislature and perhaps bloodshed, had not the 
Free-Soilers intervened as pacificators, Messrs. 
Townshend and Morse having been nominated by 
a convention entirely independent of both the old 
political parties and elected in opposition to the 
candidates of both were in a position which gave 
confidence to the Democrats that their claims would 
be fairly heard and decided without adverse pre- 
possessions. 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 107 

"The legislature was therefore organized and 
the claim of the contestants for the seats of Hamil- 
ton County was referred substantially to the umpir- 
age of these two gentlemen, for it so happened that 
all the other members were regarded as committed 
to one side or the other and were equally divided. 
Upon the question of the prima facie right of the 
Democratic claimants, and on their certificates, 
assuming at this stage by common consent the con- 
stitutionality of the division, these gentlemen them- 
selves divided, and the Democratic claimants were 
excluded by a tie vote. The Whig claimants, whose 
prima facie evidence was regarded as still more 
defective, were excluded by a majority of six. 
Upon the final question of absolute right to seats, 
which depended upon the constitutionality of the 
law, these gentlemen declared in favor of the Demo- 
cratic claimant, who was consequently admitted by 
a majority of one. The first use which the Inde- 
pendent Free-Soilers (for so these gentlemen were 
distinguished in contradistinction to the Democratic 
Free-Soilers on one side and Whig Free-Soilers on 
the other), was to demand the repeal of the Black 
Laws. The Democrats, having obtained justice for 
themselves, were now the more ready to do jus- 
tice to others. The Black Laws were repealed, the 
Democratic votes for repeal greatly outnumbering 
the Whig, and the Whig votes against repeal out- 
numbering the Democratic. 

" The real thing was the election of a senator. 
Here the Independents were again divided. Mr. 



108 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Morse preferred Mr. Giddings, being his neighbor 
and personal friend. Dr. Townshend preferred me. 
The Democratic Free-Soilers preferred me. Sev- 
eral of the Whig Free-Soilers preferred Mr. Gid- 
dings ; while the majority of them preferred neither 
of us, but wanted a man more diluted with Whig- 
gism than either of us. But neither Mr. Giddings's 
friends nor mine would consent to any third man 
thus brought forward, and it was finally under- 
stood that, if the Whigs would support Mr. Gid- 
dings, and the Democrats would not support me, 
my friends would vote for him, and also for Whig 
nominees, if fit and capable for Supreme Judges, 
etc. ; and, on the other hand, that if the Democrats 
would not support me, the Whigs would not sup- 
port Mr. Giddings, the Whig Free-Soilers would 
vote for me and for Democratic Supreme Judges, 
etc. Most of the Whigs were willing to go for 
Mr. Giddings, but there were some who refused to 
go for him under any circumstances, and his elec- 
tion, therefore, became hopeless. The Democrats, 
on the other hand, had long regarded me with favor. 
I was known to be opposed to the whole Whig action 
in regard to the apportionment law, and I have lit- 
tle doubt that, had I been a Democrat in regular 
party standing, I could have been elected over any 
candidate they had on my own strength. They, there- 
fore, felt comparatively little reluctance in coming 
up to my support; though they found it hard, not 
only to go out of the ranks, but to vote for an 
abolitionist. Finally, I received every Democratic 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 109 

vote, fifty in all ; and also the votes of three De- 
mocratic Free-Soilers, and of the two Independents, 
and was elected by a majority of four. I did not 
receive a single vote from the Whig Free-Soilers. 
Why they withheld their votes in disregard of the 
understanding which my friends certainly sup- 
posed to exist and which on their part woidd have 
been faithfully adhered to had Mr. Giddings re- 
ceived the Whig vote and the Democrats treated 
me as the Whigs treated him, I do not undertake 
to explain. Mr. Giddings, I have every reason to 
believe [is] in no respect responsible for their 
action." 

The above account is accurate and candid so far 
as it goes, but it minimizes Chase's own part 
in the struggle, a part for which he was then 
and afterward assailed with charges of unfair or 
of corrupt dealing; Douglas, in the heat of the 
Kansas-Nebraska struggle, twitted Chase with com- 
ing to the Senate by " a corrupt bargain or a dis- 
honorable coalition." All the accusations against 
him touch one or other of three points : whether he 
changed his opinion on the apportionment act of 
1848 ; whether he made a pretended " deal " in the 
repeal of the Black Laws ; and whether he brought 
about a corrupt agreement between the Free-Soilers 
and Democrats. The evidence, when carefully ex- 
amined, acquits him on all three counts, though it 
shows that he was the man who secured the admis- 
sion of Pugh and Pierce, who insisted on the repeal 
of the Black Laws, and who practically arranged 
the combination for his own election. 



110 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

On the question of the Hamilton County elec- 
tion Chase's position was constrained, though not 
dishonest : he preferred to have the legislature re- 
peal the law, and then call another election on the 
old apportionment ; but throughout the discussion 
he steadily took the ground that the apportionment 
of 1848 was unconstitutional and that Pugh and 
Pierce were legally elected. Townshend and Morse, 
the only members really independent of party 
bonds, were both brought — chiefly through Chase's 
agents — to vote for Pugh and Pierce. The ar- 
rangement as to the Black Laws was also due to 
Chase's agents ; Chase himself drafted the repeal 
bill, but it was carried through by Morse, one of the 
two Independents, who, before he gave the vote 
necessary for the admission of Pugh and Pierce, 
demanded and secured a written pledge signed by 
those two men and others, that they would vote for 
the long-delayed repeal of the Black Laws. 

These two preliminary measures brought about 
a total breach in the little Free-Soil contingent. All 
the eight men in the House came from the "West- 
ern Eeserve, where Whig influence was strong; 
hence it was plain that in a Free-Soil caucus the 
five men elected as Free-Soil Whigs would pre- 
dominate, and that the votes of the whole eight 
would be thrown for some Whig for senator. After 
the admission of Pugh and Pierce, the legislature 
was about equally divided, and the balance of 
power was again in the hands of Townshend and 
Morse, as is shown in the following table : — 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 



111 



Senate. 
House. 



Demo- 
crats. 


"Whigs. 


18 
35 


15 

29 


53 


44 



Free-Soil Whigs. 



Inde- 
pendents. 



Total. 



36 

72 



108 



Necessary for a choice, 55. 

As early as January 11, Stanley Matthews, 
Chase's lieutenant, reported that he thought he had 
arranged terms with the Democratic leader on the 
following basis : " That it was very important that 
the reliable Free-Soil members (Townshend and 
Morse) and the Democrats should cooperate toge- 
ther ; that to that end, Pugh and Pierce should be 
admitted to seats in the contest, to justify which, 
the Democrats will assist in your election to the 
U. S. Senate, provided that in other matters of 
office the Democrats shaU have the two supreme 
judges, the presiding judgeship in Hamilton County 
and other Democratic counties, the Free-Soil men 
to have their own selection in the other counties." 
In the end the Democrats came up to the plan 
sketched by Matthews and approved by Chase. On 
January 22 the struggle of nearly three months 
was ended by the choice of Chase as senator, every 
Democrat voting with Townshend and Morse to 
make the necessary majority of 55. 

Of few fiercely contested senatorial elections are 
there such intimate accounts. Besides the reminis- 



112 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

cences of Morse, and of A. G. Riddle, the leader 
of the Free-Soilers, we have the reports of Chase's 
envoys, Eli Nichols and Stanley Matthews, as well 
as Chase's private letter-books and diaries. In the 
whole transaction Chase had nothing to conceal. 
He began in November, 1848, to work up his 
candidacy; he was glad to be acceptable to the 
Democrats through his attitude on the Hamilton 
County question ; but he is fully borne out in his 
own claim : "I will not say that by the counsels I 
gave last winter I was uninfluenced by personal 
considerations ; but I can say that I do not believe 
that I was influenced by such considerations in any 
extraordinary degree. Certainly I neither modified 
nor compromised in any way my political principles. 
I made no pledges, came under no obligations 
which at all impair my absolute independence of 
party restraint." 

When Chase took his seat in the Senate at 
"Washington, March 4, 1849, he was beginning his 
first service as a public officer of the State or of 
the nation. In his own mind he was the repre- 
sentative of the anti-slavery forces of the West, 
and at the same time was to take a powerful part 
in reshaping the Democratic party. An early and 
unwelcome lesson was the evidence of his own 
insignificance in the eyes of nearly all his fellow 
members; to his colleagues, with one or two 
exceptions, he came as a member of a small and 
very disagreeable third party, elected by an acci- 
dent, and likely to follow Giddings's exasperating 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 113 

tactics of dragging the slavery question into de- 
bate when respectable people were tired of it. 

So far as the spread of sound doctrine went, the 
Senate was the place for a man of Chase's con- 
victions and ability of statement ; and Sumner 
predicted that he would " trouble Calhoun on 
the slavery question more than any others." Chase 
took an early opportunity to arouse the Southern 
members by a direct attack ; his maiden effort in 
debate, in January, 1850, was, as he said, " intended 
only as a first attempt on a small scale by way of 
feeling my way. It stirred up the Southerners 
wonderfully." He was quickly cooled and dis- 
armed by the lack of sympathy among his col- 
leagues. To a confidant he wrote : " You . . . know 
how much we need men in Congress. There is 
not one in the Senate who is willing to adopt and 
carry out a systematic plan of operations against 
the slave power except myself. Hale is a first-rate 
guerrillist. Seward is a Whig partisan, though 
perfectly reliable on any vote where our questions 
are concerned, and, independent of his Whiggism, 
a noble fellow. Hale has no love for the Demo- 
cracy. I alone sympathize with the Democrats on 
general questions and push out my Democratic 
principles to their anti-slavery application. If I 
had four more men who held the same relation to 
the Democratic party in the Senate, the days of 
doughfacery would be numbered." 

In the course of his term Chase and Hale were 
reinforced by two other anti-slavery men: Wade 



114 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

came from Ohio in 1851, as an anti-slavery Whig, 
but the two senators always felt that their State 
was not large enough to hold both of them ; Sum- 
ner came also in 1851 by a Free-Soil Democratic 
combination ; already a warm friend and frequent 
correspondent of Chase, he became his most inti- 
mate coadjutor, but never an aid in his parlia- 
mentary struggles. It was not until the great con- 
flict over Kansas-Nebraska that other Whigs and 
Democrats — Hamlin, Fessenden, Seward, Everett, 
— came forward and joined in the onslaught on 
slavery. In the House during 1849-51 there were 
less than a dozen Free-Soilers. Chase enumerated 
Wilmot and Howe of Pennsylvania, King of New 
York, Allen of Massachusetts, Booth of Connecti- 
cut, Tuck of New Hampshire, Durkee of Wis- 
consin, Root of Ohio, and, last but first, Giddings. 

The parliamentary side of Chase's senatorial ca- 
reer was a painful disappointment to him. When 
the time came for forming the committees, in De- 
cember, 1849, his case was duly considered by the 
Democratic caucus, and nearly all the Northern 
senators proposed to recognize him as one of them- 
selves by giving him a chairmanship of a good 
committee ; but Southern men objected ; and when 
the " slate " was made known, out of the one hun- 
dred and twenty-two committee places there were 
none for Chase and none for Hale. A little later 
Chase was put on the insignificant Committee on 
Revolutionary Claims. In 1851, although he en- 
rolled himself in the official list as a " Democrat," 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 115 

he had only one committee appointment ; and in 
1852 neither Chase, Seward, nor Hale had any 
committee places, except as later they were called 
to fill vacancies. By the next year, however, Chase 
had won a position for himself, and in the appoint- 
ments for 1853-55 he had three places. 

This cavalier treatment showed a radical differ- 
ence of opinion between the regular Democrats and 
Chase as to his political status. In his own mind 
he had created a " Free Democracy," or " Free-Soil 
Democracy," or " Independent Democracy," in 
which the great principles of the old party were 
acknowledged, such as the sub-treasury and free 
trade ; and, in addition, he expected soon to see the 
principle of anti-slavery accepted by the regular 
Democracy. Hence he said in July, 1849 : 

"I am a Democrat, and I feel earnestly solici- 
tous for the success of the Democratic organization 
and the triumph of its principles. The doctrines 
of the Democracy on the subjects of trade, currency, 
and special privileges command the entire assent 
of my judgment. But I cannot, while boldly as- 
serting their principles in reference to those sub- 
jects, shrink from their just application to slavery." 
He did not blink the probable effect of the new 
policy on the party. "Let it be so," he said. 
" The compensation will be found in the concen- 
tration, unanimity, and the invincibility of the 
united Democracy in the free States. Triumphant 
in the free States, and strong in the strength of 
their principles even in the slave States, the Demo- 



116 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

cracy can elect all its national candidates, under 
such circumstances, in despite of all opposition." 

Throughout his term Chase was a busy and con- 
scientious senator, with a strong sense of interest 
in his constituents and of duty to his State, but 
also with an energy to see the public business done, 
and a watchfulness to protect the public treasury. 
In the conduct of public business Chase showed 
a lofty impatience with delays, with extravagance, 
and with secrecy. He had a strong sense of urban- 
ity in debate, and held himself well against the 
numerous attacks made upon him ; he had also a 
timely feeling of the prerogatives of his station, and 
insisted that the Senate had a right to originate 
money bills; but he came out strongly against 
the private sessions of the Senate, and in 1853 got 
fourteen votes (including that of Douglas) for 
opening the doors during executive sessions. 

For his Ohio constituents Chase was a pushing 
and a successful representative ; he felt the dignity 
of standing for a great State and expressing its 
will on public questions ; he also felt that his con- 
stituents were entitled to share in the favors of 
the federal government. Hence he urged and 
secured an elaborate custom-house building, a ma- 
rine hospital for Cincinnati, and a canal around 
the Portland Falls at Louisville, one of the few 
river improvements which have proved of large 
benefit to commerce. 

The most serious questions on which Chase had to 
take ground, aside from the issue of slavery, were 






THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 117 

those arising out of the public lands. From the 
beginning, immense areas had been granted, first 
for bounties, then for state purposes, and finally, 
since about 1830, to States, to be used for building 
canals. Since so much was given, sales of course 
fell off ; hence about 1850 a new idea came to the 
front, — that of offering public lands as gifts to 
people who would settle them for five years. Both 
Chase and Wade were among the most ardent sup- 
porters of some kind of land grants, and the Ohio 
legislature instructed them to push the Homestead 
Bill. " I regard the public lands," said Chase, " as 
the estate of the people, and Congress merely as a 
trustee." In July, 1854, the Homestead question 
was well debated, and the most serious objection 
against it was the incitement to immigration. 
Though the Know-No thing movement had now 
begun, and many prudent men hedged on the ques- 
tion of inviting in more foreigners, Chase boldly 
favored the admission of immigrants, and the be- 
stowal upon them of the privileges of the act ; and 
he also moved to strike out the limitation to 
" white " persons. 

The railroad land-grant system, which began in 
1850, with a gift to the Illinois Central, was con- 
trary to the extreme Democratic principle of with- 
holding governmental support of States or people ; 
but when so ardent a Democrat as Douglas took 
the lead, Chase could do no more than try to re- 
duce the acreages granted and the privileges given 
to the railroad companies. The rapid develop- 



118 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ment of California caused an agitation for a rail- 
road to the Pacific, which took form in a bill de- 
bated in 1852-53. At the very beginning of the 
discussion, Chase pointed out the political impor- 
tance of the question as to whether the eastern 
terminus should be placed North or South, and he 
secured what he afterwards called " the first prac- 
tical measure looking to the organization of a 
Pacific railroad, which received the sanction of 
Congress ; " this was an appropriation for surveys 
to be made previous to any selection of the route. 
In 1855 he interested himself in the passage of a 
bill for the construction of the Pacific railroad, but 
it failed in the House and went over until 1862. 

As a member of a committee on pensions or 
claims during most of his term, Chase was im- 
pressed by the readiness of the Senate to approve 
undeserved claims, and to tack upon appropria- 
tion bills items against which committees had re- 
ported. Hence he heartily supported the Court of 
Claims, proposed in 1850 and finally created in 
1855. In the annals of the Senate Chase appears 
almost always as a critic of appropriation bills and 
as a mover of amendments to strike out doubtful 
clauses. He patiently watched and repeatedly ex- 
posed certain perennial jobs, especially one involv- 
ing a sum of $350,000, inserted year after year, for 
" Creek depredations ; " he also blocked an attempt 
to secure the L'Amistad claim, against which the 
Supreme Court had indirectly decided in 1842. 
Indeed, Chase pushed his watch-dog character so 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 119 

far that he opposed a new treasury building, and 
succeeded in striking out a clause for official resi- 
dences for the Vice-President and heads of depart- 
ments, two propositions which would have been 
very serviceable to him eight years later. He even 
spoke against new water-works for Washington, and 
decidedly opposed raising the salary of the district 
judge of New Hampshire from $1000 to $1400, on 
the ground that the State paid only $1200 to its 
supreme judges. No man can be perfect in econ- 
omy, however, and Chase had his pet extrava- 
gance: he strongly urged an appropriation of 
$30,000 for a statue of America by Hiram Pow- 
ers, notwithstanding the objection of a fellow sen- 
ator, who bluntly affirmed, "I do not believe in 
buying any more female figures on trust." His 
ideas of the functions of government in general 
are summed up in a speech of December, 1852, in 
which he refers to "these principles of economy, 
prudence, loyalty, and reform which distinguish 
genuine from false Democracy." 

On most of the great questions which came before 
the Senate, Chase rarely made a formal speech. He 
had his principles and he expressed them ; but he 
felt that his energies belonged to the cause of anti- 
slavery, of which he became the national champion 
in the Senate, as Giddings was in the House. Hale 
was a free lance, and it was not in his caustic na- 
ture to convince anybody ; Sumner was not a tac- 
tician ; Wade was no man to lay out a line of 
argument and carry it through a long debate; 



120 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Seward was, as Chase said, "first for the Whig 
party." The watchman on the wall was Chase; 
the debater who could confute Douglas was Chase ; 
and Chase was the man whose speeches summed up 
the calm argument of the unflinching anti-slavery 
men and spread it through the country in the crises 
of 1850 and of 1854. 

His first parliamentary experience was in the 
furnace heat of the Compromise of 1850. We now 
know that the purpose of the Mexican war had 
been to secure California, and thus to extend a 
slave belt across from the Gulf to the Pacific ; 
therefore the slaveholders felt deprived by the 
California free constitution, and tricked by Presi- 
dent Taylor, especially when he refused to turn 
over any part of New Mexico to Texas, and tried 
to make New Mexico also a free State. Indeed, 
there was good constitutional reason for believing 
that in New Mexico and California slavery had 
already disappeared under Mexican law. The ques- 
tion gave to Chase a new chance to present his 
favorite constitutional arguments on slavery. 

To the men of the South, however, the issue was 
not one to be settled on narrow arguments of con- 
stitutionality, or through the application of Mexi- 
can law, or by hostile majorities in Congress. The 
doctrine that slavery was to be regulated exclu- 
sively by States had served very well in the early 
days of the republic, when slavery was an institu- 
tion of local concern, like land tenure or primo- 
geniture or the whipping-post. Ever since 1820, 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 121 

however, slavery had become consciously a system, 
in the maintenance of which slaveholders in every 
State and Territory were interested, for they were 
all put on the defensive by the humanitarian pro- 
gress of the world, which had left the South be- 
hind. 

Those writers who charge upon the abolitionists 
the responsibility of arousing the South and com- 
pelling it to take the offensive-defensive, forget 
that there must have been numerous and aggressive 
abolitionists, unless the Northern States were to 
remain just where they had been in 1750. In 
colonial times the two sections had the same stand- 
ards of treatment of inferior and dependent beings : 
they were both brutal to apprentices, indentured 
servants, debtors, prisoners, paupers, insane people, 
and slaves. During the half century from 1775 to 
1825, the frank, undisguised, unashamed cruelty 
of the eighteenth century gave way in the North ; 
but it still continued in the South. The jails and 
penitentiaries had been Gehennas everywhere in 
1790, and were such still in most of the Southern 
States in 1850 ; but the Pennsylvania state prison 
was a model for the world. Hence the cruelty of 
slavery, which was the stock in trade of the aboli- 
tionists, was to the Southern men of 1850 still a 
disagreeable necessity : they even invited Northern 
friends to come down and view the institution, just 
as Eussian officials have welcomed travelers to 
see the Siberian prisons, supposing them to be a 
normal kind of prison. But while intelligent 



122 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Northern men admitted the heartlessness of their 
slaveholding fathers, the South positively denied 
that slavery had ever been cruel, and treated her 
own reformers as public enemies. 

Furthermore, the Southerners had grievances 
which to them seemed to come of simple Northern 
hypocrisy. The abolition efforts to prohibit slavery 
in the District of Columbia had in their eyes no 
other purpose than to degrade them by setting a 
national disapprobation on a practice which had 
lasted in Washington half a century. The open 
defiance of the fugitive slave laws seemed to them 
not only a refusal to carry out a constitutional obli- 
gation, but also an annulment of regulations with- 
out which the fields could not be tilled, or food 
prepared for the family. Hence when the South 
was asked to fulfill its constitutional obligations by 
proper treatment of free negroes from the North 
and from abroad, it answered simply that the pre- 
sence of slaves in free States was not a menace to 
the lives of the people, but that strange free 
negroes in the South might be inciting insurrec- 
tion, and they could not be allowed to go at large. 

Even had it been true, as Calhoun and his fol- 
lowers alleged, that slavery was " a positive good," 
the zeal of the South to extend it into other regions 
was not a benevolent desire to extend the positive 
good. It was the instinctive feeling that slavery 
could not stand in the face of the disapprobation 
of the federal government, and that to prevent 
such disapprobation they must have more slave 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 123 

States, and more senators and representatives, and 
more electoral votes. Hence the absolute determi- 
nation of the South never to admit the principle 
crystallized in the Wilmot Proviso, the principle 
that freedom was the normal condition of annexed 
territory. 

Against the compact forces of slavery, with their 
perfect understanding, was opposed, in the Con- 
gress of 1849-50, a disorganized and temporary 
coalition of anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats who 
hated and distrusted each other and could not 
stand side by side, while many Northern Demo- 
crats and some Northern Whigs were ready to vote 
with the South. Into this controversy came Chase, 
then forty-one years old, an able speaker and 
abler reasoner, and full of the force of conviction. 
On January 10, 1850, he took occasion to say that 
no menace of disunion could move the anti-slavery 
men from their path; he declared that the true 
Democratic principles were those of the Ordinance 
of 1787, which included the prohibition of slavery 
in the Territories. Butler of South Carolina had 
already prepared himself to crush the upstart, and 
now read one of Chase's letters, which was plainly 
a prophecy that the Democratic party must eventu- 
ally shake off its Southern membership and become 
sectional. Chase made no reply ; and two weeks 
later Butler accused him of drafting the resolution 
of 1843, described above, approving " mental reser- 
vations" in an oath to the Constitution. Chase 
absolutely denied authorship of, or adhesion to, the 



124 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

resolution, but was evidently timid of measuring 
strength with Butler. 

These were skirmishes preliminary to the great 
debate on the Compromise. February 2 Chase 
wrote to a friend : " You have seen Clay's Com- 
promise resolutions — sentiment for the North, 
substance for the South — just like the Missouri 
Compromise — all that is in issue given up by 
the non - slaveholders — unsubstantial concessions 
of matters not in issue by the slaveholders. The 
great discussion is evidently near at hand, and I 
must speak. Well, I have broken the ice, though 
all circumstances have conspired to prevent any 
adequate preparation on my part. I will speak. 
Perhaps the sling and the five stones from the 
brook will again avail against Goliath." 

It was impossible for Chase to understand that 
the Compromise was already decided, since the 
agreement of Clay and Webster meant the effect- 
ive coalition of the Southern Whigs and Northern 
" Cotton Whigs." Even Webster's " Seventh of 
March speech," to which Chase listened with an 
indignation set forth in a letter of that date to 
Sumner, was virtually an announcement that the 
Senate would vote for the Compromise, and that 
there was no combination of anti-slavery men in 
the House which could stand out. 

The two great speeches against the Compromise 
were Seward's and Chase's. The two men had 
now been for some months associated, but there 
seems to have been little sympathy between them. 



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THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 125 

In December, 1850, Chase wrote : " I don't know 
what Seward will do. I have never been able to 
establish much sympathy between us. He is too 
much of a politician for me." When, in January, 
1851, Seward asked Chase's support for an anti- 
slavery Whig in Ohio, Chase replied : " So far as 
I could judge from the tone of his friends in New 
York towards me, I could not think that I appeared 
to them in any very agreeable light, for they, espe- 
cially the ' Tribune,' were in the habit of abusing 
me without any stint." Indeed, there was a strong 
contrast between the two senators, each in his first 
term : Seward, fresh from the prestige of service 
as Governor of New York, leader in a powerful 
party, protected by the devices of Thurlow Weed, 
the confidant of the President; Chase, an acci- 
dental senator, with but one sympathetic colleague, 
fighting in an unpopular cause. Yet of the two 
men Chase was the stronger assailant of the pro- 
posed Compromise. 

The senator from Ohio was at the time in great 
anxiety over the dangerous illness of his wife, but 
his speech of March 26-27, 1850, is the best piece 
of work which he had as yet done. With a modest 
allusion to his own lack of experience in debate, 
he states at once his formidable position : " We 
have no power to legislate on the subject of slavery 
in the States. We have power to prevent its ex- 
tension, and to prohibit its existence within the 
sphere of the exclusive jurisdiction of the general 
government. Our duty, therefore, is to abstain 



126 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

from interference with it in the States. It is also 
our duty to prohibit its extension into national 
territories, and its continuance where we are con- 
stitutionally responsible for its existence." By a 
long historical argument he aims to show that the 
fathers of the Constitution, so far as they could, 
legislated against slavery ; and then he points out 
how the slave power has possessed itself of the 
federal government, noting, by way of illustration, 
that the South has always had a majority of the 
judges of the Supreme Court, and that " no North- 
ern man has filled the office of chief justice during 
this century." 

The second half of the speech goes directly to 
the merits of the various branches of the proposed 
Compromise : he objects to the " Omnibus Com- 
mittee," and insists that the California question 
has already been settled by the California consti- 
tution ; he proposes to leave the question of the 
Texan boundary for later settlement, and denies 
any obligation to erect new States out of Texas ; 
and he firmly insists on the recognition of New 
Mexico without slavery. Regarding the District 
of Columbia, he denies that Maryland has a right 
to require the continuance of slavery there, and he 
affirms the power of Congress to regulate the inter- 
state slave trade. As to fugitive slaves, he finds 
not the slightest power in Congress to legislate 
concerning them. On every point, except the slave 
trade in the District of Columbia, he traverses the 
Compromise resolutions, and on every point he sur- 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 127 

passes every speaker on his side in clear and cogent 
statement of the constitutional reasons for his con- 
victions, in insight into the real purposes of the 
slave power, and in a firm stand against disunion. 

At the time this speech was delivered the seri- 
ous questions before the Senate had narrowed down 
to two, — a new fugitive slave law, and the status 
of slavery in New Mexico, including the Texan 
boundary. To these two questions Chase addressed 
himself in his highest strain. He cited the histori- 
cal precedents for the power of Congress to pro- 
hibit slavery in the Territories ; he called to witness 
the state legislatures which had instructed nearly 
half the senators to vote for the Wilmot Proviso ; 
and he relentlessly followed out, point by point, 
Webster's declaration "that he would not take 
pains to reaffirm an ordinance of Nature, nor to 
reenact the will of God." " Sir," exclaimed Chase, 
" I should like to know what laws we are to reen- 
act if we are not to reenact the will of God — the 
rights of human nature are not derived from human 
law. Men are ' created equal,' they are ' endowed 
by their Creator with inalienable rights.' Aggres- 
sions upon these rights are crimes." As to the 
national exclusion of slavery from the Territory, 
Chase took ground which was abundantly justified 
by the experience of the next ten years : " So long 
as a powerful and active political interest is con- 
cerned in the extension of slavery into new Terri- 
tories," said he, " it is vain to look for its exclusion 
from them except by positive law." Furthermore, 



128 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

he drew from Southern senators the statement that 
in their view a master had the same right to take 
slaves into a Territory as to take any other pro- 
perty thither, and that the federal government was 
bound to protect such slave property. 

In the light of later history, Chase's argument is 
sound and convincing ; but he recognized that the 
question was not wholly one of constitutional right, 
and that there was a possibility of Southern action 
contrary to law or reason. Webster had made a 
splendid apostrophe to union, much dulled by his 
opinion that the Union was in no danger. Chase 
took higher ground : " The South will dissolve the 
Union! This cry, Mr. President, neither aston- 
ishes nor alarms me. Shall we yield to the outcry ? 
For one, I say, Never ! In my judgment, it is time 
to pause. We have yielded point after point ; we 
have crowded concession on concession, until duty, 
heroism, patriotism, shame, demand that we should 
stop. . . . We of the West are in the habit of 
looking upon the Union as we look upon the arch 
of Heaven, without a thought that it can ever decay 
or fall." 

Upon the critical question of slavery in New 
Mexico, the radical men on both sides demanded 
some explicit statement. On June 3 Jefferson 
Davis raised the direct issue by moving, "That 
nothing herein contained shall be construed to pre- 
vent said territorial legislature passing such laws 
as may be necessary for the protection of the rights 
of property of any kind which may have been, or 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 129 

may be hereafter, conformably to the Constitution 
and laws of the United States, held in or intro- 
duced into said Territory." Then Chase proposed 
the searching amendment, " that nothing herein 
contained shall be construed as authorizing or per- 
mitting the introduction of slavery or the holding 
of persons as property within said Territory." The 
issue thus presented obliged Cass and Douglas to 
explain themselves as to their theories regarding 
the right of the people of the Territories to govern 
themselves ; and the fierce debate led to a test vote 
on Chase's amendment showing 21 affirmatives (in- 
cluding both Chase and Douglas) and 36 negatives 
(including Cass). Although hopelessly beaten by 
this vote of the Senate on the main question of 
territorial slavery, Chase continued to offer amend- 
ments intended either to modify or to annul offen- 
sive clauses. 

The death of Taylor made it possible to utilize 
the majorities in favor of the Compromise, and 
from August 9 to September 14, the six successive 
compromise bills passed the Senate. Chase stood 
out to the last, and on September 18 introduced a 
bill to prohibit slavery in the Territories, as an indi- 
cation of his desire to reopen the controversy just 
settled. But the solid business men of the North, 
whose influence brought statesmen like Webster to 
support the Compromise, were satisfied ; and, in- 
deed, a large majority of the voters, both North, 
and South, were glad to be at peace. The actual 
question of slavery in New Mexico seemed and 



130 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

indeed proved insignificant ; but the organization of 
the two Territories of Utah and New Mexico with 
clauses " extending " the Constitution and laws, and 
promising to admit them as States " with or with- 
out slavery as their constitution may prescribe" 
was a virtual admission of the two dangerous prin- 
ciples, that the South was entitled to a share of 
annexed territory, and that in all its portion of 
such territory it was at liberty to introduce slavery, 
if circumstances permitted. Chase wrote to Sum- 
ner, September 8, 1850 : " Clouds and darkness 
are upon us at present. The slaveholders have suc- 
ceeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months 
ago. True, some have demanded even more than 
they have attained ; but this extreme demand was 
necessary to receive the immense concession which 
has been made to them. Without it executive in- 
fluence and bribery would, perhaps, have availed 
nothing. ' Well, what now ? ' I say with blind 
Milton, glorious child of Freedom, though blind, — 

' Bate no jot 
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 
Right onward.' " 

The violent rescue of the fugitive Shadrach in 
Boston, in February, 1851, gave Chase an opportu- 
nity to point out how impossible it was to put an 
end to discussions on slavery ; indeed, he prophe- 
sied that the Fugitive Slave Law would " produce 
more agitation than any other which has ever been 
enacted by Congress," and that it would never be 
effectively executed. This summary of the facts 






THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 131 

of the case drew upon Chase the wrath of Doug- 
las, whose bold misstatements were too much for 
Chase's debating skill. It also led Clay to taunt 
Chase with being an abolitionist. Chase replied 
with spirit, denying any connection with disunion- 
ists, but asserting his fellowship with those " who, 
within the limits of constitutional obligation, seek 
to rescue this government from all connection with 
slavery." 

The greater part of Chase's energy during 1851 
and 1852 was directed to a vain attempt to build 
up what he called the " Free Democracy." He 
made efforts to support and encourage newspapers 
favorable to his plan, and especially to stem the 
tide which was drawing Free-Soil Democrats back 
to their party. On May 30, 1851, in a speech at 
Toledo before a Democratic mass-meeting, he de- 
clared : "I was elected as a Democrat, recognizing 
and well known to recognize the duty of carrying 
out Democratic principles in their practical appli- 
cation to every subject of legislation." But though 
he might be a good Democrat, the other good 
Democrats would have nothing to do with Chase's 
Free-Soil friends, and the tide ran steadily against 
him. In 1850 the Ohio Democrats refused to 
accept anti-slavery doctrines ; yet Chase gave for- 
mal notice that he should support the Democratic 
state ticket against his old Liberty friend, Samuel 
Lewis. 

At no time in his life was Chase so far separated 
from his anti-slavery friends as during the two 



132 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

years, 1851 and 1852; and though he afterward 
regained their confidence, he never got back the 
feeling of hearty friendship which would have been 
so valuable for his own later political hopes. In 
the campaign of 1852 he was virtually compelled 
by the nomination of Pierce on a "finality " plat- 
form to join his old Free-Soil allies. 

In the election of 1852 the fortunes of the Free 
Democracy seemed to be at as low an ebb as those 
of Chase himself ; they could not strike a respon- 
sive note in the popular mind, and the Whigs, from 
whom more was to be expected than from the 
Democrats, were routed. Pierce was triumphantly 
elected, and Hale got only 157,000 votes, about 
half the Free-Soil vote of 1848. The new Demo- 
cratic President at once surrounded himself by 
ultra pro-slavery influences, and made Jefferson 
Davis a member of his cabinet. Nevertheless the 
election of 1852 showed the third party in excel- 
lent fighting trim, especially in the Northwest. In 
1853 it made a strong canvass in the state elec- 
tions ; and in Ohio, where Chase took an active part 
in the campaign, it raised its vote from 32,000 to 
50,000. A few far-sighted men saw that the great 
Whig party was about to resolve itself into its ele- 
ments, and that the field was open for a new politi- 
cal aggregation founded on the slavery issue. 

In an open " Letter to Hon. A. P. Edgerton," 
dated November 14, 1853, Chase showed his grow- 
ing despair of the national Democracy, which ad- 
hered to the Compromise of 1850 and especially to 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 133 

the Fugitive Slave Law, and was trying to cry down 
the discussion of slavery everywhere. After that 
letter there could be no place and no hope for 
Chase in the Democratic party. In the Ohio 
state election of 1853 the legislature which would 
elect his successor to the Senate showed a clear 
Democratic majority, and in due time elected 
George E. Pugh ; and Chase's six years' effort to 
influence the Democratic party was at an end. 

The Nebraska Bill, introduced by Douglas in 
1854, was simply an attempt to make good to the 
South the expected advantages which had not ac- 
crued from the Compromise of 1820 ; that is, to 
give to the slave power the strip west of Missouri, 
at least as far as California, in compensation for 
the barrenness of New Mexico ; and it came about 
at just this time because the great electoral ma- 
jority of 1852 made the Democratic leaders think 
that no excess could deprive them of their power. 
The proposal to set aside the Missouri Compromise 
came as a surprise to the Southerners, who had not 
supposed that the deficiency of which they were 
beginning to be conscious could be made up with- 
out another annexation ; but it was just the kind of 
aggressive measure which Chase and other aboli- 
tionists had long predicted. Yet Chase was as 
much taken aback as others not in the secret. On 
December 31, 1852, he thought that the adminis- 
tration "would worry along without any marked 
defeats henceforth ; " but on January 22, 1854, the 
conflict had begun and he writes: "Douglas, I 



134 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

suppose eager to compel the South to come to him, 
has out-southernized the South ; and has dragged 
the timid and irresolute administration along with 
him." 

Chase's greatest opportunity had at last come to 
him ; for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was 
able to concentrate all the previous experience of 
his life. A fair parliamentarian, held back by no 
party allegiance, already cut loose from his con- 
stituency in Ohio, standing for the free Northwest 
against the Northwestern champion Douglas, strong 
in constitutional exposition, matured by five years 
of conflict in the Senate, known far and wide as a 
fearless political abolitionist, above all inspired by 
seventeen years of conscientious hatred of slavery 
and the slave power, Chase showed himself not 
only a bold, sagacious, high-minded man, but also 
a skillful leader of the unorganized anti-slavery 
forces, a formulator of great principles, a herald of 
freedom to his countrymen, and one of the founders 
of a new national party. His part in the Kansas- 
Nebraska contest is attested by his chief adver- 
sary, for Douglas later said of him : " In opposi- 
tion Seward's and Sumner's speeches were essays 
against slavery. Chase of Ohio was the leader." 

The questions included in the contest may be 
briefly stated. The prime object was to give to 
the South a slave State north of Texas ; but the 
Missouri Compromise stood in the way. To repeal 
that statute would be an act so aggressive that 
Douglas invented the ingenious romance that it 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 135 

had already been "superseded" by the Compro- 
mise of 1850. The South demanded something 
more definite ; Douglas introduced a clause setting 
forth that the Act of 1820 had been "repealed" 
by the Act of 1850, and he took his stand on the 
" principle of non-intervention," by which, he said, 
the people of a Territory were left free to deal with 
the question of slavery for themselves. The early 
stages of the Nebraska Bill, therefore, indicate 
Douglas's attempt to shape his measure so as to 
command the support of Northern Democrats by 
its principle of the freedom of territorial voters, 
and to satisfy Southern Democrats by its principle 
of the slavery of the territorial negro. 

On January 4, 1854, Douglas reported his bill 
in its first form, as a simple proposition for the 
organization of the Territory of Nebraska ; on 
slavery the bill simply repeated the uncertain 
clause of the Compromise of 1850. In a second 
form, dated January 10, the bill declared that all 
questions relating to slavery should be settled by 
the people themselves through their appropriate 
representatives. The third form, reported January 
23, divided the region into two Territories, and in 
express terms declared the Missouri Compromise 
" inoperative," in that it was " superseded " by the 
legislation of 1850. In its final form the bill 
contained what Benton called " a stump speech in- 
jected into the belly of the bill," — a long declara- 
tion that the power over slavery in the Territories 
resided not in Congress, but in the people of the 
Territories. 



136 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

At every step there was constitutional, political, 
and moral reason for opposing this bill in any of 
its protean forms. It was unnecessary; it was 
illogical ; it was inconsistent ; it was founded on a 
falsehood ; it broke faith which had been kept a 
third of a century ; it brought on a sectional con- 
flict. Nevertheless it had elements of strength, and 
was from the outset likely to pass. In the first 
place, some act organizing the Territory was neces- 
sary, and this was the bill reported by the regular 
Committee on Territories. In the second place, 
Douglas was a terribly hard fighter. He was 
counted the most dangerous debater in public life, 
because he had great power of bold and satirical 
statement, and that advantage which the madman 
has over men cautious for their own lives, for 
he could and would say anything that was likely 
to be damaging to an adversary, without stopping 
to ask if it were true ; and because he had amazing 
address in explaining away any previous utterances 
that might embarrass him ; or, if he were cornered, 
he would plaintively assert that he had explained 
these things so many times that it was insulting to 
the intelligence to repeat his argument. In the 
third place, Douglas had by instinct seized upon a 
principle which was certain to be popular. The 
frontier Territories were really colonies on their 
way to become States ; their legislatures, counties, 
towns, and school districts did actually manage 
nearly all the affairs of their communities ; it was 
therefore a taking proposition to say that they were 






THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 137 

as competent to settle the question of slavery as 
were the States. In the fourth place, Douglas 
early got the adhesion of Pierce, and thus secured 
a good part of the Northern Democrats. The South- 
ern Democrats could of course be depended upon 
to support a party measure introduced for their 
benefit, and Douglas confidently and with good 
reason counted on the Southern Whigs to aid him. 
In the fifth place, Douglas never in his whole life 
understood why men like Chase and Lincoln were 
opposed to slavery ; he came from southern Illinois, 
and inherited the sentiment of its early settlers 
from the border slave States, — the sentiment that 
slavery was a fact, like fire or rain or human 
nature, with good and bad sides, but fixed and un- 
questionable. 

Most of the points favorable to the bill were 
early seen by Chase. January 29, 1854, he wrote : 
"I am fully advised that the Aments [amend- 
ments] as they now stand were concocted in con- 
sultation with Pierce, and that the administration, 
with a good deal of trepidation, has resolved to 
risk its future on the bill as it now stands. Many 
of its warm friends say that they are sure to go 
down upon it. There is certainly great alarm and 
misgiving. Cass told me to-day that he was not 
consulted and was decidedly against the renewal 
of the agitation ; but he will vote with the prevail- 
ing side. A personal and near friend of the Presi- 
dent's called on me to-night and told me that Cass 
was excluded from consultation. They want to 



138 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

drag him along. Even New Hampshire wavers 
about respecting the bill. All Rhode Island, ex- 
cept, perhaps, Jones, is against it. Every Northern 
Whig without exception is against it. Houston 
and Benton are against it." 

To concentrate the elements of opposition and 
to lead the attack on Douglas and his combination 
of forces, was Chase's task. Among the most sig- 
nificant incidents in the history of the measure 
are Chase's " Appeal of the Independent Demo- 
crats," Chase's personal controversy with Douglas, 
and Chase's amendments. The great danger was 
that the Nebraska Bill might be rushed through 
both Houses before the public sentiment of the 
country could be brought to bear or an opposition 
organized in Congress. On January 25, two weeks 
after the second report of Douglas's committee, 
which disclosed the project to make "squatter 
sovereignty " the basis for the new Territories, there 
appeared in the press an " Appeal of the Inde- 
pendent Democrats in Congress to the People of 
the United States." This document, probably 
suggested by John Quincy Adams's " Appeal 
against the Annexation of Texas," in 1842, and 
based on a draft by Giddings, was written by 
Chase, who a few months later claimed it " as the 
most valuable of my works." He had aimed at 
first to get the signatures of Ohio members of all 
parties, and to address it to Ohio ; but it had 
taken a wider range, and was signed by Chase, 
Sumner, Giddings, and Edward Wade of Ohio, 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 139 

Gerrit Smith of New York, and De Witt of Mas- 
sachusetts. The change of purpose had delayed it 
so long that, though dated January 19, it did not 
appear until the 25th and 26th. The appeal was 
at once taken up as the statement of the free 
North. In terse, brief, vigorous form it revealed 
the real blackness of the bill, its violation of the 
compact of the Missouri Compromise, unquestioned 
for thirty years, its effect on free laborers, its inva- 
sion of human rights. A few extracts will better 
show its spirit than can any analysis. 

" We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a 
sacred pledge ; as a criminal betrayal of precious 
rights ; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to 
exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants 
from the Old World and free laborers from our 
own States, and convert it into a dreary region of 
despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves. . . . 

" The pretenses, therefore, that the territory cov- 
ered by the positive prohibition of 1820 sustains a 
similar relation to slavery with that acquired from 
Mexico, covered by no prohibition except that of 
disputed constitutional or Mexican law, and that 
the Compromises of 1850 require the incorporation 
of the pro-slavery clauses of the Utah and New 
Mexico Bill in the Nebraska act, are mere inven- 
tions, designed to cover up from public reprehen- 
sion meditated bad faith. Were he living now, no 
one would be more forward, more eloquent, or more 
indignant in his denunciation of that bad faith 
than Henry Clay, the foremost champion of both 



140 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

compromises. . . . The interests of freedom and 
the Union are in imminent peril. Demagogues may- 
tell you that the Union can be maintained only 
by submitting to the demands of slavery. We tell 
you that the Union can only be maintained by the 
full recognition of the just claims of freedom and 
man. The Union was formed to establish justice 
and secure the blessings of liberty. When it fails 
to accomplish these ends it will be worthless, and 
when it becomes worthless it cannot long endure. 

" We entreat you to be mindful of that funda- 
mental maxim of Democracy — Equal eights 

AND EXACT JUSTICE FOR ALL MEN. Do not Sub- 
mit to become agents in extending legalized oppres- 
sion and systematized injustice over a vast territory 
yet exempt from these terrible evils. 

" We implore Christians and Christian ministers 
to interpose. Their divine religion requires them 
to behold in every man a brother, and to labor for 
the advancement and regeneration of the human 
race. . . . 

"Whatever apologies may be offered for the 
toleration of slavery in the States, none can be 
offered for its extension into territories where it 
does not exist, and where that extension involves 
the repeal of ancient law and the violation of sol- 
emn compact. Let all protest, earnestly and em- 
phatically, by correspondence, through the press, 
by memorials, by resolutions of public meetings 
and legislative bodies, and in whatever other mode 
may seem expedient, against this enormous crime. 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 141 

" For ourselves, we shall resist it by speech and 
vote, and with all the abilities which God has given 
us. Even if overcome in the impending struggle, 
we shall not submit. "We shall go home to our 
constituents, erect anew the standard of freedom, 
and call on the people to come to the rescue of the 
country from the domination of slavery. We will 
not despair; for the cause of human freedom is 
the cause of God." 

Although in form the address was directed against 
the slave power in general, its spirit was a denun- 
ciation of the men who were responsible for it; 
indeed, the third report of Douglas's committee, 
January 23, had caused Chase to wait a day in or- 
der that he might add a hasty postscript, in which 
he used such harsh language as the occasion justi- 
fied. The " superseding " clause he called " a 
manifest falsification of the truths of history — Mr. 
Douglas himself never advanced such a pretense 
until this session. . . . Will the people permit their 
dearest interests thus to be made the mere hazards 
of a presidential game, and destroyed by false 
facts and false influences ? " 

That Douglas was the one responsible force in 
bringing forward this bill no one doubted, least of 
all Douglas himself. Four years later he said to 
his autobiographer, Cutts : " I refer you to my 
speeches in the Senate for the whole argument on 
the Kansas-Nebraska Act. I passed the Kansas- 
Nebraska Act myself. I had the authority and 
power of a dictator throughout the whole contro- 



142 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

versy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. 
It was the marshaling and directing of men and 
guarding from attacks and with a ceaseless vigi- 
lance preventing surprise." Hence Douglas must 
have expected hard knocks, and was prepared to 
defend himself by one of his usual savage attacks. 

January 30, Douglas came into the Senate in a 
reckless fury, crying : " Our motives are arraigned 
and our characters calumniated — coarse epithets 
are applied to me by name. . . . This was done 
on the Sabbath day and by a set of politicians, to 
advance their own political purposes, in the name 
of our holy religion." He declared that Chase 
had " violated all the rules of courtesy and propri- 
ety ; " and when Chase disclaimed offense, Douglas 
added : " It may be that I shall be able to nail that 
denial, as I have the statements which are over 
his own signature, as a bare falsehood." With 
his usual hawk-like keenness, Douglas fixed upon 
Chase, as an evidence of bad faith, an erroneous 
statement made by some New York papers ; though 
at the same time he did not hesitate to interpolate 
words into his own quotations from the "Appeal." 

This study of legislative billingsgate is necessary, 
because it was the first time that Chase's hon- 
esty had been questioned in the Senate, and be- 
cause behind the vituperation of Douglas was a 
method, — an attempt to transfer the discussion 
from the objections against the bill to the objectors 
themselves, and thus to terrorize his opponents. 
No man living enjoyed debating against Douglas. 






THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 143 

Lincoln, four years later, was barely able to drive 
him into a corner ; and Chase would have been 
glad to avoid the controversy. " I know the 
gigantic stature of the senator," said he, " I know 
the weight and importance which he possesses in 
the country — and I know also the great disad- 
vantages under which I enter into any controversy 
which he provokes." Afterward, indeed, Chase 
made a rather weak attempt to disclaim having 
had Douglas especially in his mind. " We spoke 
of the bill," said he, " and spoke of its character. 
We said nothing about the individuals who were 
its authors." But the most powerful argument 
against the bill was its bad faith ; and who but 
Douglas had made bad faith its principle ? The 
next day the controversy was renewed, and Chase 
was nettled into saying : " I expect no courtesy 
and desire none from the senator from Illinois." 
Douglas later recovered his temper and made over- 
tures of peace, but the proud Ohio statesman could 
not forget the assault upon him. 

Issue was at once joined in both Senate and 
House on the merits of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 
and for many weeks the attention of the whole 
country was given to the debate. By amendments 
offered February 3 and supported by a long and 
able speech, Chase singled out two minor yet vital 
questions ; namely, whether the Compromise of 
1850 did in fact " supersede " the Compromise of 
1820, and whether the territorial legislature was 
really expected to have full control over slavery. 



144 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

To the first point Douglas directed all his formida- 
ble powers, for it was his policy to avoid the role 
of a disturber of the peace. The second point was 
distinctly brought out by Chase in the clause usu- 
ally called " the Chase amendment," " under which 
the people of the Territories, through their appro- 
priate representatives, may, if they see fit, prohibit 
the existence of slavery therein." This was a 
direct test of the sincerity of Douglas's doctrine 
of popular sovereignty. Without such a clause, as 
Chase showed, the legislature was left subject to 
a governor's veto and to the construction of judges 
appointed by the President. Douglas could not be 
brought to meet this question squarely. He was 
satisfied to leave to the territorial government 
powers "subject only to the Constitution of the 
United States ; " for he knew as well as Chase that a 
favorite Southern doctrine was that under the Con- 
stitution neither Congress nor a territorial legisla- 
ture could interfere with any master who chose to 
take his slave into a Territory. Chase's amend- 
ment was therefore voted down, 10 to 36 ; and in 
like manner was treated every one of his amend- 
ments intended to make the territorial government 
more popular, — such as his proposals to let the 
people elect their territorial officers, to create only 
one Territory instead of two, and to extend the suf- 
frage to aliens who had declared their intention of 
becoming citizens. 

So far as the Senate was concerned, the result 
was from the first predetermined, for Douglas must 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 145 

have known, on January 24, that he had more than 
a majority. But the country had become aroused, 
and by the time the Senate came to a vote, on 
March 3, Chase was at the head of a compact 
body of strong men, Whigs and Democrats. Hale 
was now out of the Senate ; but Chase's colleague, 
B. F. Wade, stimulated by the overwhelming sen- 
timent of Ohio, came to his aid with a coarse but 
effective rhetoric, resembling that of Douglas. 
Seward also entered the lists against Douglas, care- 
fully confining himself to the repeal of the Com- 
promise of 1820 ; and Walker and Dodge of Wis- 
consin, and Fessenden of Maine took valiant part 
in the debate. For two days, March 2 and 3, there 
was a running fight, in which Douglas showed his 
immense powers, silencing his opponents right and 
left, and returning with the most furious language 
to his attack on Chase, unblushingly twisting his 
own record, and insisting over and over again that 
the Compromise of 1850, though in its terms ap- 
plying to New Mexico and Utah, was intended to 
repeal the Missouri Compromise, which applied to 
the Louisiana purchase. Chase was no match in 
debate for this extraordinary man, and on the test 
vote, March 3, the bill passed the Senate by 37 
to 14. 

The fate of the measure now depended on the 
House, in which Chase's counsels and magazine 
of arguments were useful ; but he had no such in- 
fluence as that of Douglas, who carried half the 
Democrats with him, lobbied on the floor of the 



146 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

House, and passed the bill by a majority of 108 to 
100. On its return to the Senate, Chase made his 
last speech on the subject, presenting a calm view 
of the real" purpose of the bill, — the perpetuation 
of the slave power, — and predicting that so far as 
the new Territory was concerned the South would 
lose in the end, because this Territory would be 
colonized by men from the free States. 

Wade truly said : " The humiliation of the North 
is complete and overwhelming. No Southern enemy 
of hers can wish her deeper degradation." In 
1846 most of the Northern States had favored a 
prohibition by Congress of slavery in every Terri- 
tory in the Union except in the Indian Territory ; 
in 1854 Northern Democrats opened to slavery 
every Territory then existing or to be annexed. 
Slavery, instead of decaying by the slow process of 
emancipation, for which many slaveholders had 
once hoped, had resisted every attempt made to 
check it by national action, and was now advancing 
into free regions. 

The North was beaten, but it was aroused. 
From the "Appeal of the Independent Demo- 
crats" in January to the passage of the act in May, 
there had been a succession of public meetings 
which threatened political ruin to Northern mem- 
bers of Congress who should side with Douglas, and 
which sent out addresses, protests, and memorials. 
For example, John Jay wrote to Chase on February 
7 : " We accept the gauntlet thus thrown down to 
the free States. I am ready for the fight between 



THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENATOR 147 

Slavery and Freedom. . . . We swear for ourselves, 
and will teach the oath to our children, never again 
to enter into a truce with such an accursed and 
faithless power, — but to fight on and to fight ever, 
until Congress has gone to the farthest limit of its 
power for the extinction of slavery and the slave 
trade — and the Constitution has been so amended 
as to leave us free from all responsibility for the 
devilish system." 

Jay and the thousands of anti-slavery men like 
him, both old abolitionists and recent converts, had 
to be organized before their importance could be 
felt in Congress and in the state administrations. 
In the last hours of the final debate Chase pointed 
out, and Douglas anathematized, the inevitable po- 
litical result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Chase 
declared that the Whig party was rent in twain, 
and that the Northern wing was about to unite 
with the Independent Democrats in a new party. 
Douglas replied in his fiercest vein, declaring that 
such a coalition meant " civil war, servile war, and 
disunion. I do not hesitate," he exclaimed, " here 
in the presence of its leaders and confederates, to 
denounce the scheme as involving treason in its 
most revolting form. I accept your challenge; 
raise your black flag ; call up your forces on the 
Constitution, as you have threatened it here. We 
will be ready to meet all your allied forces." With 
that challenge and reply the discussion of the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill ended in the Senate, and 
the Eepublican party began. 

To Chase the end of his term as senator, in 



148 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

March, 1855, was a disappointment. In his six 
years he had gradually become a power in that 
conservative body, and, notwithstanding his anti- 
slavery principles, he appears to have carried away 
with him the respect of all his colleagues except 
Douglas; even Soule, most ardent of the fire- 
eaters, had a personal regard for him. Though 
Chase never could learn the quickness and adroit- 
ness which made Seward and Hale such formidable 
debaters, he knew how to argue, and especially how 
to state great principles in a popular form. The 
" New York Evening Post " said of him, at the end 
of his term : " We always counted on his opposi- 
tion to a corrupt or extravagant expenditure or 
appropriation ; and we could always depend on his 
cooperation to restrain action of the federal gov- 
ernment within its proper sphere." On all the 
phases of the slavery question he was the senator 
who cared most about it, and who therefore never 
yielded or compromised. When he left the Senate 
there was no one to take his place, for Seward and 
Wade and the other leaders of the new Kepubli- 
can party had the caution of chieftains, showing 
a willingness to yield a part of their platform if 
they could get the rest. In his career in the Sen- 
ate Chase showed that lack of imagination in things 
political which was a characteristic throughout his 
life. What seemed to him reasonable he thought 
must have equal weight in other minds ; but he 
also showed his other dominant characteristic, — a 
consciousness of moral responsibility in his politi- 
cal service. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 

The reason for the existence of the political abo- 
litionists was that slavery was a political question, 
was a vital question, and must eventually become 
the basis of a division into national parties. The 
new economic conditions of the country so far 
caused the disappearance of old party issues that 
the low revenue tariff of 1846 was in the fifties 
accepted by the whole country, the Bank was no 
longer urged by anybody of influence, and though 
people squabbled over land grants, internal im- 
provements, and homestead laws, none of these 
questions were tenets of party faith. Ever since 
the debates on the annexation of Texas, however, 
the issues which really interested voters and occu- 
pied party leaders brought in some phase of the 
slavery question. The Liberty men seized upon a 
live issue, took definite ground upon it, and had 
reason to expect that large numbers would come 
out from the old parties to join them. Hence the 
new life and the elasticity shown in the elections of 
1853, when the Free Democrats became aware that 
the Whig party was at last moribund. 

Among the Whigs some strong anti-slavery men, 



150 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

like Seward, were always allowed to remain in 
regular standing with their party ; but the Demo- 
crats deliberately crushed out that element in their 
party by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Douglas prob- 
ably expected to see the loss of voters through 
the secession of Northern Democrats made good 
by the adhesion of Southern Whigs ; and though 
he was shrewd enough to foresee a combination of 
the bolting Democrats with the Northern Whigs 
and the handful of organized Free Democrats, he 
relied on branding such a coalition as a " sectional 
party; " and his inability to understand the moral 
indignation against slavery caused him to under- 
estimate the number of Democrats who would not 
accept any further extension of slavery. 

The Kansas - Nebraska Bill was therefore the 
shock which started a new process of party crystal- 
lization. While the debate was in progress, con- 
ventions of " Anti-Nebraska " men began in the 
Northern States ; and the passage of the act, May 
30, 1854, increased the excitement, and stimulated 
a formal organization of political anti-slavery men. 
In various Northern States, members of Congress 
and men at home united in calling local conven- 
tions to nominate state and congressional candi- 
dates for the elections of 1854. The Michigan 
convention, held at Detroit, July 6, 1854, took upon 
itself the name of the Republican party, already 
several times used by local gatherings. The new 
title was assumed by the Ohio anti-Nebraska con- 
vention of July 13, and during the campaign Repub- 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 151 

lican organizations were formed in all the other 
Northern States. In this great movement Chase 
had a large part, perhaps larger than that of any 
other one man. He describes his action in his own 
State as follows : " Immediately after the passage 
of the Nebraska Bill I prepared a call for a con- 
vention in Ohio to organize a ' Democracy of the 
people' in opposition to the servile Democracy. 
"Wade joined me in a letter inviting signatures, 
and the letter and call were sent to . . . Ohio; 
but a movement for a similar convention, less defi- 
nite in object, . . . superseded that which we pro- 
posed." 

This movement at once proved its popularity. 
Though Pierce had 13,000 majority in Ohio in 
1852, the election of 1854 showed a Kepublican 
majority of 80,000 ; the congressional delegation 
of 1853 was 12 Democrats, 6 Whigs, and 3 third- 
party men, but every member elected in 1854 was 
an anti-Nebraska man. Some States, including 
Massachusetts, elected Anti-Nebraska state offi- 
cers; and in the congressional election nearly all 
the Northern Douglas Democrats in the House lost 
their seats, and a clear anti-Nebraska majority was 
chosen for the national House, which would assem- 
ble in 1855. Such was the reply of the country to 
Douglas's principle of squatter sovereignty. 

From Chase's own statements it is plain that 
during 1854 he had not yet rid himself of the 
belief that a purified Democracy was the party of 
the future; he could not understand, and never 



152 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

did clearly understand, the importance of choosing 
a new name and making a new party in which 
Whigs, Democrats, and Free Democrats might all 
join without feeling that they were accepting the 
designation or the principles of former political 
enemies. In December, 1854, he still calls himself 
an " Independent Democrat," and says : " In the 
recent election in Ohio I entered heartily into the 
People's movement, which was nothing more or 
less than a cooperation of Liberal Democrats, In- 
dependent Democrats, and Whigs, for the election 
of reliable slavery prohibitionists to the next Con- 
gress and of rebuking the pro-slavery action of 
the administration party." By cooperation Chase 
meant temporary fusion rather than a consolidated 
party. 

Three influences combined to waken Chase from 
the delusion that there could be a Democratic anti- 
slavery party : these were the rise and fall of the 
Native American, or Know-Nothing party, his 
nomination for governor of Ohio in 1855, and the 
Kansas troubles. The Know-Nothings began to 
come up as the Whigs disintegrated ; they formed 
a convenient rallying point for Northern and 
Southern Whigs, who liked to act together and 
were willing to take common ground against the 
foreigner; and as their success in the state elec- 
tions of 1854 and early 1855 seemed to promise 
them continuance as a national party, thousands of 
ardent anti-slavery men went into their organiza- 
tion. Chase, however, by nature and education 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 153 

was opposed to distinctions founded merely on race 
or birthplace, and in dignified and spirited, al- 
though cautious, terms expressed his lack of sym- 
pathy with the movement in a private letter to Dr. 
Paul, December 28, 1854. 

" For one," he says, " I wish to see this People's 
movement go on in the liberal spirit which has 
thus far characterized it. But if it is to be under- 
stood that the Know-No things who participated in 
it will henceforth ignore the anti-slavery element 
or support no candidates who are not members of 
their order, or whose nominations are not dictated 
by them, those who regard the slavery question as 
of paramount importance and whose principles 
will not allow them to become members of Know- 
Nothing associations, must of necessity assume 
an antagonistic position. If this conflict shall 
arise, it is plain that the People's movement 
cannot go on or must go on without the Know- 
Nothing cooperation. It becomes the friends of 
Liberty to be prepared for every event. ... I 
cannot take upon myself any secret political obli- 
gations. I cannot proscribe men on account of 
their birth. I cannot make religious faith a polit- 
ical test." . . . 

February 21, 1855, Chase expressed himself with 
more freedom : " There is not in my opinion the 
slightest reason to believe that the ultra-Nativism 
and anti-Catholicism imputed to the Know-Nothings 
will be permanent characteristics of any great polit- 
ical party. Just as little reason is there to think 



154 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

that secrecy can be maintained as a vital element 
of political organizations. I do not therefore share 
the apprehension which some of the best friends of 
Liberty sustain in respect to the Know-Nothing 
movement." 

Chase's power of political organization, narrowly 
successful in the senatorial election of 1849, now 
brought to him a new dignity. In July, 1855, he 
was nominated by the Anti-Nebraska Republican 
convention for the governorship of Ohio. Among 
the " Come-Outers," Chase still stood as a Demo- 
crat, and among the old Whigs he was still looked 
upon as a renegade; hence the decision in both 
nomination and election lay with the Know- 
Nothings, who gave him to understand that he 
might have their nomination only by joining their 
order. For several months negotiations went on, 
with a view to securing both Know-Nothing and 
Republican support; and the letter to Dr. Paul, 
of December, 1854, was published in June, 1855, 
to show the kindly feeling of Chase toward good 
Know-Nothings who were opposed to slavery, and 
at the same time to make clear to the Germans 
that he had not bowed the knee to the anti-foreign 
Baal. 1 

1 A letter of J. M. Ashley, tinder date of May 9, urges Chase 
to omit a paragraph and otherwise to revise the letter; with 
these changes, he says, " there can be no doubt in our minds of 
its placing you far in the ascendency of Seward or any other man 
in the United States." Ashley said that the changes would not 
affect the principles of the letter. There is no evidence to show 
that Chase consented thus to appear to have said what he did not 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 155 

In spite of all these efforts, the Independent 
Democrats and Kepublicans called separate con- 
ventions. The old Whigs offered Chase the nom- 
ination as state supreme judge, but he insisted on 
an anti-slavery platform and a fair division of the 
ticket as the condition of fusion with the Know- 
Nothings. The critical date was July 13, when a 
" People's Convention," in part made up of Know- 
Nothings, assembled at Columbus and nominated 
Chase for governor. The old Whigs nominated 
Trimble, a Know-Nothing ; and the old Democrats 
nominated Joseph Medill. 

Chase looked upon his nomination as a public 
protest against the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise, and in the campaign which followed he 
made one of his most arduous and effective tours 
of stump-speaking. In this triangular campaign, 
the attitude of the Germans became a matter of 
great importance ; they had usually preferred the 
Democratic party in the Northwest, especially 
after the forced emigration of some of the ablest 
and most liberal of their countrymen, in 1848, for 
acting as democrats in Germany. Hence it was a 
delicate matter for Chase to hold both the native 
American and the German vote. On election day 
the vote was as follows : Chase, 146,000, Medill, 
131,000, Trimble, 24,000. Ford, candidate for 
lieutenant-governor, got 13,000 more votes than 

say ; but as this is the only approach to untruthfulness discovered 
in Chase's political life, it has seemed desirable to state the facts 
upon it. 



156 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Chase on the same ticket ; yet there can be no 
doubt that Chase was the strong element in the 
political combination. The effects of this election 
were far-reaching : in 1855 the anti-Nebraska 
movement seemed to lose elasticity, and State after 
State went back to the Democracy ; it was Chase 
who stemmed the tide, held the third State in the 
Union, strengthened the national party for the 
election of 1856, and retained his place as one of 
the official leaders of the Republican party. 

When he was inaugurated as governor of Ohio, 
in January, 1856, the State was no longer the 
frontier community of the earlier days, for which 
a canal-boat was thought to be a proper emblem 
on the great seal of the commonwealth. Coal- 
mining, long important, had become a large 
industry since 1845, when bituminous coal was 
first used in Ohio for smelting iron ; the State was 
now bound together, east and west, north and 
south, by lines of railroad ; Cincinnati and Cleve- 
land had become manufacturing cities ; and the 
population had been much altered by Irish and 
German immigration. In national affairs Ohio 
was beginning to assume a position as a central 
and pivotal State ; indeed, one Northwestern presi- 
dent, Harrison, had been an Ohio man, and Ewing, 
Corwin, and Lewis Campbell were leaders in Con- 
gress. 

The chief magistrate of Ohio, however, might 
still be described by a phrase which Chase had used 
twenty-five years earlier in his History of Ohio, — 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 157 

"The governor is a name almost without mean- 
ing." Without a veto power, with very small 
powers of appointment, with little official ceremony 
or prestige, the ablest governors had few oppor- 
tunities to affect the destiny of their State, and 
many chances to make blunders. The governor 
could not control other state officers elected on the 
same ticket with himself, and yet was certain to be 
held responsible for their faults. 

Chase was not cut out for a popular governor. 
While in the Senate he had been accused of cold- 
ness, aloofness, and lack of human instincts, 
although his sense of his own uprightness and his 
belief in his clearness of judgment had been much 
chastened by his first four years in that body. 
Now, as a renowned champion of freedom, for the 
first time in his life chosen to an important office 
by popular vote, one of the defenders of the cause 
in Kansas, a sage in his own party, Chase found 
himself almost in a new atmosphere, and had 
already begun to muse upon that picture of 
" President Chase " which came back to his mind 
every year during the rest of his life. 

The lack of "personal magnetism" did not 
prevent him from making an excellent governor. 
His small patronage was skillfully fostered, and 
the Germans had full recognition. Of his policy 
in state affairs he says later : " I at once addressed 
myself to the duties of my new position. I sought 
to promote all practicable reforms; encouraged, 
by all the means in my power, the interests of 



158 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

education; endeavored to reorganize the military- 
system of the State ; and omitted no opportunity 
of making the voice of Ohio heard on the side of 
freedom and justice. At the same time, I endeav- 
ored, as far as practicable, to conciliate opposition 
founded on misapprehension, and succeeded finally 
in organizing a compact and powerful party, based 
on the great principles of freedom and free labor.' ' 

There was plenty of opportunity for a man to 
make his influence felt in such matters. He 
reformed the militia system, which was in such a 
condition that a refusal to issue arms to other than 
uniformed companies was regarded as an inno- 
vation; he took much interest in securing a 
geological survey of the State; he advocated a 
bureau of statistics ; he urged better opportunities 
for the state university and for common schools ; 
and he busied himself in founding a railroad com- 
mission. This last suggestion came from an early 
foresight as to the power likely to be acquired by 
great corporations through the control of all the 
transportation upon a large area. Chase was one 
of the earliest statesmen to see this danger and to 
try to provide against it. 

Hardly had the new governor begun his service 
when the election of 1856 again called out his 
greatest energy. The national Native American 
party, of which Horace Greeley had said that 
" you might as well talk of a national anti-potato- 
rot party," broke up in February, 1856, by the 
secession of the anti-slavery Know-Nothings. With 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 159 

their aid and that of the bolting Democrats the 
Kepublicans had a fair hope of outrunning, in the 
Northern States, both the regular Democrats and 
the old Whigs. This is the secret of the near ap- 
proach to the choice of a president by the Repub- 
licans in 1856 ; for they proved to have pluralities 
in every Northern State except New Jersey, Penn- 
sylvania, Indiana, and Illinois. 

How far a man may, with good taste and up- 
rightness, enter into a personal canvass for a nom- 
ination to the presidency is a difficult question of 
ethics. To Chase it seemed simple ; he believed 
sincerely that he had the qualities of a president ; 
he believed that the principles for which he stood 
were those to which the Republican party must 
commit itself if it was to be honest ; he believed 
that he had a large popular support throughout 
the country ; and he believed that proper organiza- 
tion and means of making himself known would 
bring about his nomination. He had no experi- 
enced lieutenants like Thurlow "Weed in New York, 
political moles to prepare the ground for him un- 
seen ; Hamlin and Ashley and Hoadly were ener- 
getic young men, but of little public reputation ; 
and though Chase possessed and cultivated an 
acquaintance in New York and New England, he 
had no workers in the East who could secure dele- 
gates or make combinations for him. The feeling 
of leadership, the desire to be President, were right 
and natural, and it does not appear that Chase 
used any but straightforward means to secure a 



160 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

nomination. It was his fault to overestimate other 
people's inclination toward him, and his weakness 
not to be on cordial terms of equal friendship with 
any of the other Kepublican leaders. 

During the first half of 1856 Chase and his few 
friends were hard at work. The preliminary Pitts- 
burg convention of 1856, the first national Ke- 
publican gathering, gave an opportunity for com- 
paring the respective strength of candidates, and 
one of Chase's friends who was present was sure 
that he would have been nominated had the con- 
vention undertaken to present a candidate. By 
this time the possible nominees had all come for- 
ward. Bailey wrote, February 21, that Seward 
would not risk seeking a nomination, and that the 
leading candidates were Preston King, Colonel 
Fremont (brought forward by Frank J. Blair), 
and John McLean. Just at this time Banks was 
chosen speaker of the House of Bepresentatives, 
and he also loomed up as a candidate. In his 
intimate correspondence with Edward L. Pierce, 
Chase revealed his own hopes and fears; he in- 
veighed against " the feeling, which some men seem 
to have fallen into, of taking up an untried man 
for President ; " he complained that Hiram Bar- 
ney, his lieutenant in New York, was " a little dis- 
posed sometimes to forbear working, in fear that 
nothing can be done." But Pierce felt compelled 
to write a cooling letter, in which he predicted the 
inevitable nomination of Fremont. 

Even with a solid Ohio delegation and the pres- 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 161 

tige of his governorship, Chase could hardly have 
been successful against the combination formed in 
favor of Fremont ; but he was now to learn the 
strength of his home opponents and enemies. Of 
the Ohio delegation he could count on only thirty- 
five, while thirty-four were for either McLean 
or Fremont. " My friends did not act," said he, 
" with the skill and decision which was required." 
In addition to these thirty-five faithful ones, about 
sixty delegates to the Philadelphia Convention 
from other States were for Chase ; though it was 
a sore point with him that he could not secure the 
New Hampshire delegation. Yet he was still con- 
fident. " It seems to me," said he, " that if the 
most cherished wishes of the people could prevail, 
I should be nominated." Nevertheless, he gave to 
Hoadly a letter of withdrawal, to be used if neces- 
sary. Hoadly saw nothing else to do, Chase's 
name was withdrawn, and Fremont was nominated. 
It was well that Chase did not succeed in risking 
his reputation in that campaign, for no out-and-out 
anti-slavery man could have polled a larger vote 
than the neutral and unknown Fremont, and yet 
he was defeated by James Buchanan. 

Though no man was himself more incorruptible 
in office, Chase could not help knowing that the 
state Republican administration, of which he was 
the titular head, was very corrupt, and that the 
state treasurer, Gibson, had refused to show his 
books ; and Ashley wrote : " There has been a very 
large number of these blood-sucking Republicans 



162 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

by name, who have shown that they would ruin not 
only the party but their nearest friends." Yet it 
seems to have been an unexpected blow to Chase 
when in June, 1857, Gibson brazenly and defiantly 
admitted that $500,000 was missing from the state 
treasury. Chase when roused showed much reso- 
lution, and even invented a new method of removal 
from office ; for when Gibson refused to resign in 
order that a successor might be appointed, the gov- 
ernor brought him to terms by threatening to make 
a vacancy by instituting legal proceedings against 
him. Still it seemed hard for Chase to admit that 
embezzlement had been going on among his friends, 
and he spoke of Gibson as " reckless " and " infat- 
uated," rather than criminal. 

The incident was very dangerous for a party 
about to enter on a campaign ; hence when pressure 
was put upon Chase to accept a renomination and 
head the fight, he could not resist, though he knew 
that he was taking in his hand his chances for the 
presidency in 1860. The campaign was more than 
arduous, it was anxious. Payne of Cleveland, 
Chase's opponent, tried hard to hold the governor 
responsible for the Gibson fraud, and is reported 
to have freely bought votes with money assessed on 
Buchanan's federal office-holders. The Whigs and 
Know-Nothings were now completely broken up, 
and the struggle lay between Republicans and 
Democrats. Chase was successful by a scanty plu- 
rality of 1500 in a total vote of 330,000 ; but the 
New York " Evening Post " said of the result : " It 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 163 

is the most complete political victory that the gov- 
ernor has ever achieved." Chase's reelection was 
a triumph because it set the seal of his own State 
on his place as a Republican leader. During the 
next three years, in the State and out of it, he 
occupied in the Republican party much the same 
position of general political counselor that he had 
held in the Liberty party ten years earlier. Even 
in state affairs he was thinking of national issues, 
and his second inaugural address was a kind of 
apostrophe to liberty. He felt himself in a stronger 
position with the legislature than heretofore. There 
were no new treasury scandals, and the credit and 
repute of his State increased ; but a new crop of 
slavery questions now came up and caused him 
great trouble. 

On the fugitive slave question the Compromise 
of 1850 had from the first been a failure : it could 
not prevent a slave from taking to his heels; it 
simply stimulated the Underground Railroad to do 
more business ; and it played into the hands of 
the abolitionists by furnishing, in nearly all the 
Northern States, object lessons as to the necessary 
violence and cruelty of slavery. By taking the 
execution of the law entirely out of the hands of 
state officers, the Act of 1850 had only suggested a 
new batch of "personal liberty laws," passed by 
Northern States to compel the federal government 
to do all the work of pursuing the fugitives and 
securing them in its own buildings. The spectacle 
of a master laying his hand upon a shaking fugi- 



164 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

tive and taking him before a United States com- 
missioner was unpleasant; and it was still more 
hateful to the people of the North to see a negro 
seized by a professional slave-catcher, whom he had 
never seen before, armed with a power of attorney 
or a bill of sale ; besides, many people liked the 
excitement of leading the deputy marshals and 
their assistants astray, or of defying federal au- 
thority. 

Another self-destructive element in the Fugitive 
Slave Law was its plain and necessary violation of 
the ordinary principles of human justice. Under 
the act, the question whether a man was or was 
not the fugitive described in the allegation was 
decided by "summary proceedings," without a 
jury. If a slave, he was legally subject to the pro- 
cess and had no right to complain ; but if he was a 
free man, he was entitled to the ordinary protec- 
tion of life and liberty, which this law denied him. 
A jury trial was what the anti-slavery people con- 
tinually demanded ; but everybody knew that in a 
free State it was next to impossible to impanel a 
jury in which twelve members would unite in hold- 
ing any particular negro to be a fugitive or any 
rescuer to be a criminal ; one might as well expect 
a Georgia jury to acquit a slave-stealer. In some 
States personal liberty bills prescribed a jury trial 
in defiance of the Act of 1850, or even required 
state attorneys to defend the negroes claimed. 

On the other side, the Act of 1850 had laid new 
and severe penalties for interference with capture 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 165 

by " harboring or concealing " the fugitive, or by- 
resisting the pursuer ; in 1852 an attempt was even 
made, in the Castner Hanway case in Philadelphia, 
to hold resistance to slave-catchers to be construc- 
tive treason, so as to fix upon the crime a death 
penalty. State governments grew restive over the 
status of both black and white citizens or residents 
who were thus swept within the authority of the 
federal courts on charges growing out of the Fugi- 
tive Slave Law. A favorite method of raising the 
question as to the rival jurisdictions of State and 
nation was to get a habeas corpus from a state 
court, so as to examine the status of alleged fugi- 
tives or their rescuers ; and in 1858, in the famous 
case of Ableman v. Booth, the Wisconsin Supreme 
Court hewed through the difficulty of rival jurisdic- 
tion by roundly declaring the Act of 1850 unconsti- 
tutional, and therefore no bar to state proceedings, 
and no cause for national interference. 

In this exciting controversy Chase was one of 
the great figures, though by his moderation of con- 
duct he gave much offense to the ultra-abolitionists. 
Late in March, 1855, he was called as counsel for 
Rosetta, a colored girl of sixteen, who had been 
taken from the control of her master, while traveling 
by rail through Ohio, and declared free by a state 
court. She was, however, seized by a United States 
deputy marshal, and from his custody rescued by a 
writ of habeas corpus, argued before a state court 
by R. B. Hayes. A second time the marshal seized 
her. On Chase's advice a test case was made, by 



166 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

asking for proceedings for contempt against the 
marshal ; he was, however, discharged by Justice 
McLean of the United States court, on the ground 
that the process authorized by the Fugitive Slave 
Law was not subject to interference by a state court. 
To-day it is clear that the federal authorities, in 
their insistence on the superiority of federal law, 
were on the side of orderly national life. The 
Fugitive Slave Law was simply one of the instances 
in which a proper discretion must include the power 
to do injustice. 

About two weeks after Chase's inauguration as 
governor, a slave family named Garner escaped to 
Cincinnati ; the next day United States Marshal 
Eobinson came to capture them, but the slaves re- 
sisted, and in a frenzy of excitement Margaret 
Garner seized a butcher's knife and killed her 
little daughter. The capture of the fugitives was 
at once traversed by an indictment of the Garners 
in a state court for murder; nevertheless they 
were given into the custody of the marshal by 
habeas corpus proceedings before a United States 
court, and by him taken before Commissioner Pen- 
dery, who held them to be fugitives; thereupon 
they were forthwith carried to Kentucky and deliv- 
ered to their master. 

These legal proceedings had dragged on for four 
weeks. The proposed state trial was of course 
simply a means of holding the negroes out of the 
master's hands, and was likely to keep up the gen- 
eral excitement over slavery ; for everybody knew 






THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 167 

that under such circumstances no Ohio jury would 
convict a slave mother or her accomplices of mur- 
der. The case put Governor Chase into a cruel 
perplexity. At the beginning he had promised to 
sanction the process of the state courts "by the 
whole power at the command of the executive ; " 
but the final delivery of the fugitives had been 
hasty and unexpected, and nobody could claim for 
the negroes that they were not legal slaves. As a 
last resource, on March 4 he sent a requisition to 
the governor of Kentucky for the return of the 
" murderess," arguing with much force that slaves 
could not be permitted to cross the river into Ohio 
and there commit crimes with impunity. Governor 
Morehead of Kentucky granted the request; but 
the master had by this time carried the slaves out 
of his State, and the confidential agent whom Chase 
sent to buy them reported that Margaret Garner 
had been sent " down the river." The Kentucky 
authorities had no wish to examine into the matter 
again, and no further proceedings could be had. 

In 1864, when the question was again raised by 
the furious attacks of Wendell Phillips, Chase wrote 
that Cincinnati was at that time hostile to him, 
that he was taken by surprise, and that he was in 
Columbus at the critical moment. The real reason 
probably lies somewhat deeper ; the governor of a 
State is bound to exercise more caution than a pri- 
vate man. Chase had formerly been attorney for 
fugitives ; he was now governor of the whole State, 
and hence attorney for all its people. In a similar 



168 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

case, that of the fugitive Anderson, in 1857, the 
part which Governor Chase took in the controversy- 
was thus described by himself some years later : — 

"Judge Leavitt, at Cincinnati, then issued a 
writ of habeas corpus directed to the sheriff, re- 
quiring him to produce his prisoners. The writ 
was obeyed, and application was made to me to 
have the State represented upon the hearing. I at 
once directed the attorney-general to appear, who 
did so, and argued the questions arising in the case 
with great ability. Mr. Pugh and Mr. Vallandig- 
ham appeared on the side of the slave-catchers. 
The result was what was indeed foreseen — an 
order by Judge Leavitt discharging the prisoners. 

"The leading administration paper denounced 
my action as a declaration of war on the part of 
Chase and his abolition crew against the United 
States. I was indifferent to it." 

The matter had grown so serious that in July the 
governor went to Washington to settle the con- 
troversy. Cass, Secretary of State, had retained a 
feeling of admiration for Chase from their sena- 
torial days, and he now brought about a meeting 
with President Buchanan, in which it was agreed 
that the suits should be dropped on both sides. A 
few months later, however, Chase, in the canvass 
for his reelection, took a more belligerent tone. 
" We have a right," said he, " to have our state 
laws obeyed. We don't mean to resist federal 
authority. Just or unjust laws properly adminis- 
tered will be respected. If dissatisfied we will go 






THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 169 

to the ballot-box and redress our wrongs. But we 
have rights which the federal government must 
not invade, rights superior to its power, on which 
our sovereignty depends ; and we do mean to assert 
these rights against all tyrannical assumption of 
authority. I know not what will be done in Cham- 
paign County. The courts will determine that. 
But I do know that if the marshals who violate our 
laws are indicted and the writs for their arrest are 
placed in the hands of our state officers they shall 
be executed. And we expect the federal govern- 
ment to submit." 

The next year the validity of state process when 
opposed to national was put to another test. In 
September, 1858, a fugitive slave, John Price, was 
rescued out of the hands of his claimants by an 
armed mob of Oberlin people. The proceedings 
dragged on till the summer of 1859, when two of 
the rescuers were convicted. Meantime applica- 
tion had been brought before the Ohio Supreme 
Court to grant a habeas corpus to inquire into the 
status of the two convicted men, a step which 
would practically mean raising the question of the 
constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. May 
24, 1859, a mass meeting was held at Cleveland to 
protest against the convictions. Governor Chase 
came, and threw the weight of his official influence 
against violence, and also against the Fugitive 
Slave Law. His first words, " Citizens of Cleve- 
land ! law-abiding citizens of Cleveland ! " struck 
a responsive chord in the meeting, and made it 



170 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

easy for him to add : " I will only say what I have 
frequently said before, that as long as the State of 
Ohio remains a sovereignty, and as long as I am 
her chief executive, the process of her courts shall 
be executed. The process of the United States 
courts must not be slighted or resisted; but as 
long as I represent the sovereignty of our State, I 
will see that the process of our state courts shall 
not be interfered with or resisted, but shall be fully 
enforced.' ' 

The state Supreme Court stood three to two 
against interfering ; whereupon the next Eepubli- 
can convention punished one of the three, Judge 
Swan, by refusing him a renomination. Mean- 
while one of the counsel for the prisoners, A. G. 
Riddle, had made an effective use of state process : 
the capturers of John Price had been indicted for 
kidnapping, and as their man was gone they could 
not prove that he was the person described in their 
papers. They would be tried in the same county 
in which Oberlin lay, and they might count on a 
unanimous and hostile jury. The administration 
now showed its interest in the whole controversy 
by sending Attorney-General Black to look into the 
cases ; and when Riddle proposed to him to aban- 
don the kidnapping suits, if all the suits against 
the rescuers were discontinued, the astute Phila- 
delphia lawyer saw nothing else for it. This result 
was summed up by an administration organ in 
the caustic words : " So the government has been 
beaten at last, with law, justice, and facts all on 









THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 171 

its side, and Oberlin, with its relentless, higher- 
law creed, is triumphant." 

The period of Chase's governorship was also a 
period of great influence and usefulness in national 
questions of slavery, especially on " Bleeding Kan- 
sas." Douglas's moral obtuseness had played him 
a trick when he brought forward the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise. He not only failed to 
foresee the indignation of the North, but he also 
left out of his calculations the probability that 
Kansas, the southern of the two new Territories, 
might be controlled by free-state men. When the 
Southerners saw the danger of its slipping out of 
their grasp, they naturally held Douglas responsi- 
ble ; and he, in his wrath at the practical workings 
of popular sovereignty, could only reply that " the 
whole trouble in Kansas was due to the Emigrant 
Aid Societies." In November, 1854, the first ter- 
ritorial election showed 2000 votes from a commu- 
nity with only 1200 voters, and in March, 1855, 
a territorial legislature was chosen by the most 
shameless intimidation and fraud. Throughout 
1855 and 1856 Chase was in communication with 
the men in Kansas who were trying to undo this 
wrong, — writing letters of counsel and comfort, 
rousing energy, promising "good rifles," and in 
public speeches denouncing the policy of the suc- 
cessive presidents, Pierce and Buchanan. 

Fortunately for Kansas and for the country, the 
national House of Eepresentatives from 1855 to 
1857 had a majority of anti-Nebraska men, who 



172 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

could and did restrain any action by Congress in 
favor of the pro-slavery domination of Kansas. 
When, in July, 1856, a local civil war broke out in 
Kansas, Governor Chase wrote, in the fiercest indig- 
nation, to Governor Grimes of Iowa : " We must 
not sit still while our brethren in Kansas are in 
such imminent peril. You are nearest of all the 
free-state governors to the theatre of action. . . . 
It seems to me that no time should be lost and no 
efforts spared in sending out men fully provided, 
who will remain in the Territory as actual settlers 
. . . should the pro-slavery men of western Mis- 
souri and other States again invade Kansas . . . 
every sentiment of honor and every obligation of 
duty requires us to give our outraged brethren 
. . . prompt and efficient succor, without reference 
to settlement." 

This was not the only suggestion of civil war 
made by Chase. When Charles Robinson, titular 
free-state governor of Kansas, called on some of 
the Eastern governors for support, Chase took the 
responsibility of sending to the Ohio legislature a 
stirring message, in which he recounted the wrongs 
of the Ohio men in Kansas, and rose to the em- 
phatic declaration : " These representations cannot 
be properly disregarded. As an equal member of 
the confederacy, Ohio is entitled to demand for her 
citizens, emigrating to the Territories, free ingress 
and egress by the ordinary routes and complete 
protection from invasion, from usurpation, and 
from lawless violence. If the general government 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 173 

refuse this protection, I cannot doubt the right or 
the duty of the State to intervene." 

One of the purposes of the Dred Scott decision 
of March, 1857, was to tie the hands of the free- 
state men in Kansas, and of their adherents every- 
where. But Chase, the future chief justice, had 
long entertained and several times expounded his 
want of confidence in the Supreme Court. In May, 
1847, he wrote to Hale in protest at the pro-slavery 
construction of the Constitution : " The people will 
overthrow it if they have to overthrow the courts 
too." In his Syracuse speech of August, 1853, he 
pointed out how there came to be a permanent ma- 
jority of pro-slavery justices, adding, "I take it 
upon myself to question, and with some degree of 
boldness, the decision of the court upon the subject 
of the Fugitive Slave Act ; " and in many public 
utterances of 1858 and 1859 he repeated his dis- 
sent from the doctrine that slavery must go into 
the Territories, and his intention to disregard the 
decrees of the Supreme Court. 

On the question of the Lecompton constitution, 
in 1858 Chase, like most of his friends, was be- 
fogged ; and he wrote a letter advising the Kansas 
men to accept it, and then take possession of the 
new state government and amend their constitution 
at their leisure. For this counsel Chase was less 
blamable, because the Eepublicans in Congress 
failed to comprehend that the issue was one of prin- 
ciple, and that the Republicans could not vote to 
admit a slave State at any time, whatever the pro- 



174 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

spect of its changing its status later, without under- 
mining the foundation of their party. Douglas's 
opposition to the Lecompton outrage even deceived 
many good Eepublicans into supposing that he was 
about to take their ground, and Horace Greeley 
urged the Illinois Republicans to drop Lincoln and 
let Douglas go back to the SeDate. But in Decem- 
ber, 1857, Chase wrote : " I expect little from the 
Douglas demonstration. He has no solid base in 
him. He may bluster, but he will not grapple 
with the slave power ; " and again in November, 
1859, " The great error in respect to Douglas was 
that of . . . giving him the lead in the anti-Le- 
compton fight, leaving the Eepublican senators and 
representatives only a secondary place, and giving 
to the country the impression that they were about 
ready to adopt his doctrine that slavery is as good 
as freedom, if a majority of qualified voters say so." 

One of the greatest characters in the anti-slavery 
struggle now appears in direct relations with Chase. 
In December, 1856, Chase indorsed a recommen- 
dation of Charles Robinson, commending Captain 
John Brown to the confidence of the friends of Kan- 
sas. In 1857 he subscribed twenty-five dollars for 
Brown's use, and later he received the following 
very characteristic letter, sent from Tabor, Iowa, 
under date of September 10, 1857. 

" Enclosed please find First number of a series 
of Tracts which have lately been gotten up here. 
Your frank opinion of it is respectfully asked (not 
for any hind of publication). My principle object 



THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 175 

in again troubling you, is to say that / am in im- 
mediate want of from Five Hundred to One Thou- 
sand Dollars for Secret service and no questions 
asked. I want the friends of Freedom to 'prove 
me now herewith .' Will you exert your influence 
to have it made up : in your own hands, subject 
to my order: or placed in the hands of any suit- 
able, and responsible man you may name ? 

" Please write me or have some person write me, 
directing Envelope to Jonas Jones Esqr of this 
place. 

" Very Respectfully Your Friend, 

" John Brown. 

" Friend J. Jr. will inclose this anew to destina- 
tion at once." 

Like others of John Brown's correspondents, 
East and West, Chase had shut his eyes to the 
use that might be made of his subscription, and 
he was startled by the news of the Harper's Ferry 
raid in October, 1859. The New York " Herald " 
accused him of being a party to the conspiracy, 
a charge which Chase always denied ; but he was 
drawn into the controversy by a letter of Governor 
Wise of Virginia, complaining that armed expedi- 
tions were forming in Ohio (presumably for the 
rescue of Brown), and warning him, " If another 
invasion should assail the State of Virginia, I 
shall pursue the invaders into any territory, and 
punish them wherever they can be reached by 
arms." Chase quietly replied that Ohio could not 
" consent to the invasion of her territory by armed 



176 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

bodies from other States ; " and with this exchange 
of defiances the matter was dropped. 

From the above account of Chase's four years 
as governor, it appears that his chief activity and 
his interests were, as they had been for the twenty 
years previous, in the anti-slavery cause. His most 
important addresses and messages to the Ohio legis- 
lature turned on slavery and on national questions 
arising out of slavery ; the most stirring events 
within his State were phases of slavery ; his place 
as a national leader was due to his eminence as an 
anti-slavery man ; his warmest personal friends and 
correspondents were anti-slavery men, and many 
of them abolitionists. While Seward said strong 
things and then tempered them, while men like 
Henry Wilson sought to find other issues for the 
Eepublican party, while Douglas was reelected sen- 
ator from Illinois on the programme of not caring 
whether slavery was voted down or voted up, Chase 
stood out unswervingly as a political abolitionist. 

It is true that while governor he smoothed down 
his utterances, and avoided making the issue with 
the general government which his radical friends 
desired ; but to his mind the great question before 
the people of the United States was the extension 
of slavery beyond the limits of the existing slave 
States, and his influence, voice, and purse were 
unwaveringly against the taking of fugitives, or the 
introduction of slavery into the Territories. Sum- 
ner and Giddings may have had more violent con- 
victions, but neither of them held so prominent a 






THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR 177 

station as Chase. Seward, Cameron, and Thurlow 
Weed had more influence in determining the policy 
of the Republican party, but there was not in the 
whole country in 1860 any man who had so high a 
reputation as Chase for long, unceasing opposition 
to the powers of slavery, through political means. 
If the Republican party intended in the campaign 
of 1860 to nominate a man whose name was a plat- 
form, he was the man. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE ELECTION OF 1860 

Chase's reelection in 1857 showed greater Re- 
publican vitality in Ohio than in some other 
States, for the party in general lost ground that 
year. In the congressional elections of 1858, how- 
ever, the Republicans for the first time secured a 
working majority in the House of Representatives, 
the House which was to sit from 1859 to 1861 ; 
and Buchanan took so crushing a rebuke in his own 
State of Pennsylvania that he himself dolefully 
said of it: "Our defeat is so complete as to be 
absurd." As 1860 came in, therefore, the Republi- 
cans were alert and confident : with an available 
candidate, a safe platform, and prudent manage- 
ment of the campaign, they ought to hold and even 
increase their vote, especially since their opponents 
were so disunited that Jefferson Davis, as repre- 
sentative of the Southern wing, had refused fellow- 
ship to Douglas. 

Manoeuvres for the Republican nominations 
began very early, and Chase conducted in his own 
behalf a long and anxious preliminary canvass, 
which throws much interesting light on the me- 
thods of bringing a presidential candidate before 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 179 

the public. For example, in April, 1857, he chides 
a correspondent for speaking too well of Fremont, 
and bids him remember that " there is no hope for 
our cause in the future unless there is a clear mani- 
festation of confidence in our principles and in the 
men whom the common voice declares to be the 
true representatives of them." By September, 
1857, scattered correspondents begin to announce 
that they will support him for the presidency ; and 
in November, just after his reelection as governor, 
Chase himself says : " At present it looks to me as 
if I might secure it." 

From this time on, though busy as governor, fre- 
quent in counsels on national affairs, and stunned 
like all his countrymen by the din of the Lecomp- 
ton controversy, Chase sets himself steadily to in- 
spirit his friends and to impress the public. He 
revives a plan for a campaign life of himself, which 
had been projected in 1856 ; he asks his followers 
to say " good words in correspondence, by the pen, 
and in conversation till the time shall call for a 
public movement ; " he stirs up his old friends the 
newspaper men; he goes to Commencement at 
Dartmouth College for the first time in thirty- 
two years, and is gratified by the cordial feeling in 
his favor which he thinks he finds in New Hamp- 
shire; he eats a "complimentary dinner to Gov- 
ernor Chase " at the Parker House in Boston, and 
keeps the bill of fare. In Ohio everything seems to 
his satisfaction ; old rivals take the field for him 
with enthusiasm ; and he learns that the Kepubli- 



180 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

can congressmen from Ohio are for him. In other 
parts of the country, West and East, he renews 
correspondence and finds friends. " Governor " 
Charles Eobinson writes favorably from Kansas ; 
in Pennsylvania, Joshua Hanna, a Pittsburg 
banker, and a warm personal friend, works stead- 
ily ; since Sumner has been disabled by Brooks, 
no man in New England has much interest in him 
except Pierce, who does intelligent work, and 
writes candid and discouraging letters about the 
prospect ; New York is Seward's stronghold, but 
Chase has there a devoted lieutenant in James H. 
Briggs, whom he has appointed to the valuable 
office of financial agent of Ohio. Nevertheless, 
Chase appears to be the only really energetic sup- 
porter of Chase ; at the end of the year he can 
count up more intrigues of rivals than new sup- 
porters. 

During 1858 Chase became interested in the con- 
test in Illinois, and stumped the State for the Re- 
publican state ticket, but neither he nor his corre- 
spondents mention the local politician who was 
contesting the Illinois senatorship against Douglas, 
or appear to have recognized any rivalry from that 
quarter. Like many other Republicans, however, 
Chase did discover that there was an intrigue, in 
which Schuyler Colfax had a leading part, to make 
Douglas the Republican candidate in 1860. As to 
Seward, Chase's friends thought, as was the case, 
that he had injured himself by his " irrepressible 
conflict " speech at Rochester ; and the " New York 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 181 

Tribune " and the " Independent " were supposed 
to be against him. Thus far the Ohio man was at 
least holding his own as a candidate. 

During 1859 it became important to Chase to 
keep his standing as a man in public life by show- 
ing his strength in Ohio after the expiration of his 
governorship. He was therefore much gratified 
when, on February 3, 1860, he was elected senator 
of the United States for the term beginning March 
4, 1861. By this time the elements of the presi- 
dential contest were more clearly revealed, and a 
new and very troublesome question arose, — that 
of Chase's opinions on the tariff. From Ehode 
Island, from New York, and from Pennsylvania 
came reports that he was considered unsound on 
protection. This objection was one of the unavoid- 
able results of his candid belief in the Democratic 
doctrine of " as little government as possible." He 
had approved the tariff policy of 1846 ; in many 
public utterances he had expressed his adherence to 
the Democratic doctrines as to trade ; and probably 
he still believed them to be the best ; so that he 
was hard put to it to know what to say or do. In. 
the Northwest, which was recognized as a weak 
spot for Chase, a few of his friends were trying to 
work up a sentiment for him, and reported hope- 
fully. 

The rival candidates now began to come out 
more distinctly : Banks, in Massachusetts, already 
almost overborne by his adhesion to remnants of 
Know-Nothingism ; Cameron, in Pennsylvania ; F. 



182 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

P. Blair, patron of Fremont in 1856, had de- 
serted his candidate, and was now pushing hard 
for Bates of Missouri, who was advertised as able 
to carry the border States along with the North. 
Chase's lively counselor, James M. Ashley, pro- 
posed to head off this wicked plot against a West- 
ern candidate's chances by " letting our friends in 
Illinois put Lincoln on the track ; " but an Illinois 
editor wrote that his own ticket was " Chase and 
Lincoln," for there seemed to be an impression 
that, whoever headed the ticket, Lincoln was likely 
to be vice-president. 

In his own State Chase had not the warm sup- 
port of any of the recognized party leaders or great 
newspapers ; but he counted on the good will of the 
Germans, and felt sure of a unanimous delegation 
to the national convention. One of his correspond- 
ents felt so much confidence in the future that he 
asked to be made minister to Persia; and another 
so far overestimated Chase's influence on the in- 
coming national House of Eepresentatives, in which 
there was a Republican majority, as to cry: "I 
just ache to have the position of clerk, with 20 or 
30 subs of my own appointment." All that can be 
said of Chase's chances at the end of 1859 is that 
he was a man of presidential timber and a founder 
of the Eepublican party, who nevertheless was 
looked upon as a stranger by the leaders of his own 
party, and seemed to have a poorer chance than 
any one of half a dozen lesser men. 

In the spring of 1860 came the real struggle. 






THE ELECTION OF 1860 183 

Looking back forty years, we speak of " the Re- 
publiean party of 1860," as we might speak of the 
« Federal party of 1800," or the " Whig party of 
1840." In reality there was as yet hardly more 
than a coalition ; in 1854-55 a common term had 
been " Fusion party ; " in 1856 the Native Ameri- 
cans were almost as important as the Republicans ; 
in 1860 the former Whigs, former Democrats, and 
former Know-Nothings, now united as Republicans, 
had no tradition of common principles or common 
leaders, and were still jealous of each other and 
often hostile. They came together like Highland 
clans for a common fight, marching side by side 
with men who a short time before had dented their 
shields and hewn at their heads. Every man sug- 
gested for the nomination was therefore tested by 
his power to attract, or his likelihood to repel, 
Conscience Whigs and Cotton Whigs and Hunker 
Democrats and old Free-Soilers and ultra-aboli- 
tionists, Irish and Germans and Nativists. Hence 
the strength of a movement for a man like Bates, 
who hoped to draw the border-state vote because he 
was an old slaveholder, and to satisfy the aboli- 
tionists because he had emancipated his slaves, to 
carry Pennsylvania because he was a tariff man, 
and to sweep Vermont because he was an old 
Whig. Hence the weakness of a man like Sew- 
ard, who had assaulted the Democrats in Congress 
and on the stump ; and of a man like Chase, who 
had deprived the Whigs of the Ohio senatorship 
in 1849. As the months drew on, however, the 



184 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Chase men believed that the contest was really 
narrowing to two candidates, the New York and 
Ohio champions. 

Seward was Chase's most dangerous rival, 
through both his good and his bad qualities. He 
was good-natured, companionable, and attractive ; 
he had had long experience in public life, and 
was known from end to end of the country ; he was 
naturally a warm advocate of freedom, and he 
had gone further than Chase or any other leading 
Republican in the phrasing of extreme anti-slavery 
views, especially in his " higher law " speech of 
1850 and in his "irrepressible conflict" speech 
of 1858. On the other hand, he was not a leader in 
legislation or in organizing resistance to slavery 
in Congress; he had a habit of withdrawing or 
altering his most radical utterances, and he was a 
very late comer into the Republican party, and 
might still pass as a radical but reclaimable Whig. 

The chief objection to Seward was the atmo- 
sphere of political corruption which surrounded 
him. The outcome of the Chicago Convention of 
1860 cannot be understood without knowing some- 
thing of the frame of mind in which honorable 
men outside New York, and a small but very de- 
termined band of Republicans within the State, 
looked upon the regime of Thurlow Weed and his 
management of Seward. Throughout the canvass 
suggestions were thrown out that Seward was 
unavailable because of his friends. Thus, Charles 
Robinson of Kansas wrote February 3, 1860 : " He 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 185 

is the spendthrift of the party, politically, I mean, 
and would take from us all arguments against 
the former corrupt and extravagant administration, 
and is supported so far as I can learn chiefly by 
the spoilsmen, who would destroy the party in four 
years should they get the government with their 
candidate at the head." H. B. Stanton, a New 
York delegate who voted for Seward in the Chicago 
Convention, wrote in July, 1860 : " New York 
Republicanism has been made a reproach, a by- 
word, by the rascally conduct of our state legisla- 
ture, under the lead of Weed." Even cautious 
Chase, in a letter of May 10, 1860, said: "If 
Albany is to be transferred to Washington, the 
party cannot succeed." In a long and careful let- 
ter of March 27, 1861, E. Campbell, then a New 
York state senator, thus described Seward's polit- 
ical manager, the New York boss of that time : — 

" You can only faintly imagine the extent and 
ramification of the machinery of that section of our 
party which acknowledges Mr. Weed as its leader. 

" Pardon me for this personal allusion ; I would 
ignore it if I could, and never mention it, were it 
not that in so doing I should stultify my convic- 
tions and become a party to the speedy downfall of 
Republicanism in this State. Believe me when I 
assure you that I have not the least feeling person- 
ally against Mr. Weed. He has his good qualities, 
which I believe I know how to appreciate, and yet 
is the worst man in our party in this State in the 
light of influence. 



186 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

" To explain to you the means which he resorts 
to, to control the primary meetings throughout the 
entire State, his system of levying assessments and 
holding office — to refer to the horde of political 
pensioners, dependents, and expectants which he 
has quartered upon our party, and to explain how 
by these and kindred resorts he has all along con- 
trolled state and local conventions, and, in short, 
defeated every wish of the better portion of our 
party, would only be elaborating upon what you 
can anticipate. . . . 

"Now, dear Governor, I have no other desire 
than to retire to private life at the earliest possible 
period. I never asked or desired office, nor have I 
anything now to ask of Mr. Barney for myself or 
a single relative on earth. 

" I nevertheless desire to see Mr. Weed's power 
entirely broken in this State. I desire this, first, 
because the great majority of the men under his 
control are mere vassals, and large numbers of 
them are a disgrace to our party. I desire this 
because he makes use of favoritism to destroy the 
political integrity of our entire party. I desire it 
because I believe in wholesome legislation, in a 
just, honest, and virtuous administration of public 
affairs, and because I hate thieving, and utterly 
abhor an organized system of profligacy and cor- 
ruption. 

"And now let me assure you that I do not 
believe our ills can be abated by any other means 
than by keeping these dependents of Mr. Weed 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 187 

just where they would keep all of our friends 
had they the power, — out of office. I do not be- 
lieve in proscription, nor would I advise it in any 
ordinary case. Depend upon it, however, this is 
no ordinary case. Every one of these dependents 
and vassals of Weed are so abject in service that 
they do nothing else than foster faction continu- 
ally. Whenever appointed to office through his 
influence, they seem to become his property. 

" A great popular movement is on foot to break 
forever the power of this unscrupulous political 
tyrant. That movement is sure to prove success- 
ful. The breaking of that power would disenthrall 
our party, and restore to the people their represen- 
tative rights." 

Of the other candidates, the one whom Chase 
and his friends most feared was Bates, as the only 
Westerner who was likely to compete with Chase 
for votes wrested from Seward. Cameron's candi- 
dacy none of the Chase men took seriously ; they 
reasoned that if there were any Eastern nominee 
it would be Seward. Banks they placated, in the 
hope that when he realized that he was out of the 
race he would turn his friends to them instead of 
to Seward. Lincoln Chase never looked upon as 
a rival until the day of the convention ; on the con- 
trary, in March, 1860, his lieutenant, Briggs, re- 
ported among other small matters : " Mr. Lincoln 
of Illinois told me that [he] had a very warm side 
towards you, for of all the prominent Republicans 
you were the only one who gave him aid and com- 



188 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

fort. I urged Him by all means to attend the 
convention. I was pleased with him, I paid him 
all the attention I could, went with him to hear 
Mr. Beecher and Dr. Chapin. Mr. Barney went 
with him to the ' House of Industry ' at the Five 
Points, and then took him home to tea. He was 
very much pleased with Mr. Barney." Neither 
Chase nor Barney suspected that within a year the 
big, modest, friendless visitor, to whom they had 
exhibited the splendors of the metropolis, would be 
in a position to requite this kindness by giving 
Barney the great prize of the collectorship of New 
York. 

In the early months of 1860 came the choice of 
delegates, and Chase kept careful watch of the 
state conventions, preserving a list of delegates 
elect, on which appear such memoranda as the fol- 
lowing : " California — Leland Stanford of Sacra- 
mento and Charles Watrous of San Francisco, will 
have great influence. The first choice of delegates, 
Seward ; second, Chase — in favor of any well- 
known Bepublican and opposed to any old fogy;" 
" New York — George W. Curtis, the author, for 
Seward first, with a warm side for C." Little 
comfort, however, was to be had from the choice 
of delegates. New York sent a solid delegation 
of Seward men ; Pennsylvania, except six dele- 
gates, of Cameron men (to leave their candidate 
when the expected consideration was offered) ; Illi- 
nois, of Lincoln men. In order to have any hope 
of nomination or any standing in the convention, 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 189 

Chase must also have a unanimous and interested 
delegation from Ohio. On March 3 the Ohio 
Republican convention did indeed vote by 385 to 
69 that Salmon P. Chase was the first choice of 
Ohio, but it relegated the choice of delegates to 
the local conventions, and thus designedly gave 
the opportunity for Chase's enemies to send men 
unpledged, or even opposed to him. Although 
Chase did not realize it, by this action his last 
chance was gone, many weeks before the Chicago 
Convention met. 

Through the district conventions several former 
anti-Chase men got in. Old Judge McLean could 
neither give up his presidential hopes nor forgive 
Chase for his part against him in the Free-Soil 
contest of 1848, and he picked up some delegates 
in southern Ohio. Senator "Wade had his own 
views as to who was the ablest Republican in Ohio, 
and his friends got delegates in northern Ohio, 
especially D. K. Cartter of Cleveland, later chief 
justice of the District of Columbia. Although 
Hoadly, one of Chase's nearest friends, had warned 
him in February that he did not stand the slightest 
chance, Chase was buoyant, and ten days before 
the Chicago Convention was sure that the Ohio 
delegates would vote solidly for him, and that he 
would be nominated, if his friends " had the means 
and the activity used by Mr. Seward's." 

As the time for the convention approached, 
Chase found a few friends and stanch delegates 
from other States ; but he got glimpses also of a 



190 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

stratum of intrigue into which he could not de- 
scend. The Spragues were said to have bought the 
Rhode Island state election for 1100,000, and some 
of the Rhode Island delegates were " purchasable ; " 
some delegates from Iowa were " on the trading 
tack," and in Indiana there was a " floating and 
marketable vote." A Philadelphia editor wrote to 
him with unblushing frankness that he had worked 
for Cameron, but that "if any little sub-contract 
could be given us which would enable us to realize 
a little profit, we would endeavor to serve Ohio to 
the full extent of our ability." But neither Rhode 
Island, Pennsylvania, Iowa, nor Indiana gave any 
votes for Chase at Chicago. 

The convention which met at Chicago on May 
16, 1860, was a tumultuous body, excited by the 
roars of an unusual number of spectators. The 
state elections of 1859 and early 1860 made it 
practically certain that all New England would 
give its electoral vote for any man nominated in 
Chicago ; the Northwestern States — Michigan, 
Wisconsin, Iowa, and the recently admitted Min- 
nesota — seemed also safe. Hence the fighting 
had to be done in the six doubtful States between 
the ocean and the Mississippi, — New York, New 
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. 
Out of these, only New York and Ohio had been 
Republican in 1856 ; and Illinois was Douglas's 
State, and had been carried for him in 1858. 
Hence the problem before the convention, or rather 
before the controlling spirits among the delegates, 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 191 

was really, Who can carry all the States of Penn- 
sylvania, Indiana, and Illinois ? 

The Seward men were confident that their can- 
didate could carry anything, and the New York 
delegation of 70 was backed up by a great and 
enthusiastic band of politicians who argued, shouted, 
and paraded uproariously. Edward L. Pierce, one 
of the few earnest Chase men in New England, was 
bottled up in the Massachusetts delegation, and had 
to vote for Seward. The Seward men could at 
the outset count up nearly 200 delegates out of the 
233 necessary to nominate ; but there were two 
weak elements in their calculations, — the unde- 
served reputation of their candidate as an extreme 
anti-slavery man, and the relentless hostility of 
Greeley and some other New York Kepublicans. 

The next candidate in apparent strength was 
Chase; the Ohio delegation of 46 was inferior in 
size only to those of Pennsylvania and New York ; 
coming from a Western State, it could appeal to a 
growing conviction that a Western man must be 
found to confront Douglas. The situation had 
some strength, in case it should be found that 
Seward could get no majority. Therefore Chase's 
friends made the most of his integrity of character 
as compared with Seward's loose financial admin- 
istration, of his unwavering devotion to anti-slavery 
as compared with Cameron's recent conversion, and 
of his proved ability as a public officer as compared 
with Lincoln's inexperience. Just before the con- 
vention George Opdyke of New York urged the 



192 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

nomination of Chase as a former Democrat, and 
hence likely to draw from Douglas ; he was confi- 
dent that a combination of Chase's friends with the 
Banks men and the Blairs could control the con- 
vention. 

But Chase was now to learn the bitter lesson 
that the approval of a popular vote in Ohio, twice 
given, did not secure for him the cordial aid of all 
the Ohio Eepublicans. The old Whig element had 
never forgiven him for his combination with the 
Democrats in the senatorial election twelve years 
before ; his use of his scanty patronage as governor 
had made some new enemies ; and he had not the 
art of disarming opponents by suavity and tact. 
Had there been an Ohio manager at this juncture 
to compel the forces of the State to pull in the 
same parallel ; and above all had Chase ever gained 
the friendship and confidence of the Kepublican 
leaders in other States, — senators, congressmen, 
governors, and chieftains, — he might perhaps have 
been nominated, notwithstanding his reputation for 
abolitionism. 

On the very first ballot in the convention, it was 
seen that Chase was out of the race. The Ohio 
delegation was divided, Chase receiving only 34 
out of 46, and the total Chase vote was only 49 
out of 465. On the second ballot, since there was 
no rally ing-point in the Ohio delegation, Chase sank 
to 42J, and on the third ballot only 15 Ohio men 
still adhered to him. This danger of a divided 
Ohio vote had been foreseen ; and inasmuch as the 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 193 

favorable recommendation of the Ohio state con- 
vention was not accepted as an instruction, Chase 
had urged his friends to secure a vote of the dele- 
gation pledging a unit rule. The Ohio delegation, 
wrote a correspondent to Chase, " shut themselves 
up discussing what it was impossible to determine 
beforehand, — how long they should vote for you 
as a unit, and what other Ohio man they should 
vote for as a unit. This continued Tuesday, 
Wednesday, and part of Thursday. Then when 
they determined to vote their preferences they 
worked some. But in the meantime those bent on 
defeating Seward combined to a great extent on 
Lincoln." 

Delegates who attended these long sessions have 
revealed the secret of the division in Ohio. Against 
the proposed unit rule, which was Chase's sole 
chance, some of Chase's warm adherents voted, 
because on arrival in Chicago they found that so 
many men were saying that Chase could not carry 
the doubtful States, or even Ohio, that they lost 
heart ; and they feared that when Chase was out of 
the way, Wade with his many friends in the Ohio 
delegation would sweep the Western delegates. An- 
other element of Chase's ablest supporters, — David 
Dudley Field, Hiram Barney, and George Opdyke 
of New York, — when they found his weakness in 
Ohio, went over to the most promising candidate 
then available, that is, to Lincoln ; and thus Chase 
suddenly lost support both in and out of his State. 

That the danger from Wade was overestimated, 



194 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

and perhaps imaginary, seems almost certain, as 
we look back on the affair. Wade was an old 
Whig, a very violent partisan, of rough and bois- 
terous temper, without the prestige of support by 
his own state convention. If Chase were really 
out of the way, Lincoln was the strongest Western 
candidate and the one most acceptable to Chase ; 
Lincoln was also the second choice of Indiana and 
Pennsylvania, the two States which really had a 
right to insist on a nomination which would satisfy 
them, because their vote was indispensable. Al- 
though correspondents assured Chase that nine 
tenths of the Republican voters in Ohio desired 
his nomination, an intimate friend in the conven- 
tion told him that there were "not more than a 
dozen of the whole delegation earnestly desiring or 
working for you ; " and Brinkerhoff said : " The 
truth is, the old Whigs of this State are extremely 
hostile to you ; even [John] Sherman, who is as 
liberal a Whig of the old school as I know of, and 
has a high regard for you, yet I am satisfied is 
secretly a Seward man." 

The turn of the votes, however, gave Chase's 
friends a chance to do a service to Lincoln. At 
the end of the third ballot, when he lacked one 
and a half votes of a nomination, four votes were 
suddenly transferred to him by Ohio delegates, 
for reasons thus frankly explained to Chase by one 
of the delegation : " The fifteen adhering to you 
had it in their power to nominate Mr. Lincoln and 
did it. This places us in good position with the 




M^ 



THE ELECTION OF 1860 195 

Illinois delegation, and leaves you right with the 
incoming administration." 

That Lincoln felt amicably was shown a few 
days later by a remark which he made about Chase 
to George Opdyke : " I prefer him to myself ; 
for Dr. Branford says Governor Chase combines 
greater executive, administrative and high states- 
manlike ability than any man living." In May, 
1861, Chase wrote a cordial note of congratula- 
tion to Lincoln, in which, however, he could not 
forbear saying : "I err greatly in my estimation 
of your magnanimity if you do not condemn, as I 
do, the conduct of delegates from whatever State 
who disregard, while acting as such, the clearly 
expounded preference of their own state conven- 
tion." 

Chase had come nearer to the coveted dignity 
than he was ever again to come, for this was the 
last time that he had any votes in a Eepublican 
nominating convention. His very greatness made 
him a weak candidate ; he does not appear to have 
made the slightest concession or concealment of 
his principles, further than to recommend a plat- 
form of generalities and a candidate " whose name 
would be a platform." None of his correspondents 
refer even to the usual promises of cabinet places 
and other offices as a means of influencing votes. 
Chase, like Lincoln, had no body of rich and 
powerful friends to make a campaign for him. 
His situation and his chances are well summed up 
in the apothegm of a friend : " If the Kepublican 



196 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

party is consistent, it will nominate Seward, and 
if it is not consistent, it won't nominate you." 

In the campaign Chase was active, but not con- 
spicuous. His State, by its Republican plurality 
of 21,000 in October, presaged a triumph in No- 
vember. When, therefore, on November 6, Lin- 
coln and Hamlin got 180 of the 303 electoral votes, 
it was found that Ohio gave Lincoln a plurality 
of 44,000 over Douglas, and a clear majority of 
21,000. It has often been said that Lincoln's elec- 
tion was due to the Democratic split and the exist- 
ence of four tickets. Study of the returns, how- 
ever, shows that had Lincoln or Chase or any other 
respectable Republican been the candidate against 
Douglas alone, or Breckinridge alone, or Bell alone, 
or any two of these candidates, he would still have 
been elected by small Republican majorities in the 
free States; for in every Northern State except 
New Jersey, California, and Oregon, Lincoln had 
more votes than his three adversaries combined. 

To Chase the result was, notwithstanding his 
personal disappointment, the crowning of his life 
work up to that time. The day after the election 
he wrote to Pierce : " How superb is the Republi- 
can triumph ! At length the first of the great 
wishes of my life is accomplished. The slave 
power is overthrown. When will the other, namely 
the denationalization of slavery and the consequent 
initiation of emancipation by state action, be re- 
alized?" 



CHAPTEE VIII 

THE CRITICAL TEAR 1861 

"The very first thing that I settled in my 
mind," said Lincoln in an account of the result of 
the election of 1860, "was that these two great 
leaders of the party should occupy the two first 
places in my cabinet." The two great leaders 
were Seward and Chase, and the first places were 
the State Department and the Treasury; but it 
was not till after Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated as 
President, in March, 1861, that he could count un- 
reservedly upon the services of either of the two 
men. While he " was musing the fire burned ; " 
before he could frame a policy or form a cabinet, 
the country had begun to shrink, and on the day 
of his inauguration fourteen seats in the Senate 
had been vacated. Yet in the midst of the popu- 
lar excitement and uncertainty, Lincoln struck out 
a policy of no-compromise, compelled Seward to 
accept it, inspirited Chase, managed his party in 
Congress, and drew into his cabinet every man 
upon whom he had set his heart. 

The political problem was appalling. Ever since 
the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, in 
January, 1854, the country had been divided on 



198 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the question of territorial slavery ; the Republican 
platform of 1860 was absolutely opposed to the 
creation of any new slaveholding region, whether 
by annexation, by territorial laws, or by the 
admission of a new slave State, while the Southern 
Democrats in the campaign of 1860 demanded, as 
the least that they would accept, positive pro- 
tection to slavery in the Territories by federal 
statute. To the minds of the Republicans, the 
whole secession agitation was simply a device to 
deprive them of what they had gained by electing 
a President, and to compel them to accept a pro- 
slavery policy. Before enlisting his cabinet minis- 
ters, therefore, it was necessary for Lincoln to 
make clear to them the solution of the crisis as he 
saw it, and to come to an understanding as to the 
future of an administration which many people 
asserted could never be formed at all. Hence, for 
a full month after his election he made no offer of 
any place in his cabiuet. 

Meanwhile the status of political affairs changed 
from week to week, as the secession leaders de- 
veloped their plans, as the border States became 
conscious of the difference between their interests 
and those of the gulf States, and as President 
Buchanan's do-nothing policy stood revealed. On 
the day after the presidential election the legisla- 
ture of South Carolina began to prepare for seces- 
sion, and from that time on the keenest observers 
believed that the disunionists were in earnest, and 
that the crisis could be met only by one or another 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 199 

of three courses, — by accepting secession, by com- 
promise, or by coercion. Though all the three 
methods were urged at the same time, each had its 
opportunity in one of three successive periods : 
peaceable acceptance of secession was put forward 
especially during November, 1860; compromise 
was demanded during December to stay the cotton 
States, and during January and February to pla- 
cate the border States ; and people talked of coer- 
cion during March and April. 

During the first of these epochs Chase was sim- 
ply a senator-elect, and for two months he was 
little consulted by the party leaders, and not at all 
by Mr. Lincoln. His correspondents kept him 
informed of the drift of affairs in Washington ; and 
he knew that in a meeting of the Ohio delegation, 
on December 18, Senator Pugh scoffed at any 
attempt to retain the seceding States by force, and 
Representative Vallandigham predicted that by 
inauguration day Washington would be in the 
hands of "a foreign government." The belief 
that the Union was no union was not confined 
to Breckinridge Democrats, for the Republican 
journalist and leader, Horace Greeley, was in the 
clearest tones preaching non-resistance ; on Novem- 
ber 9, 1860, his New York " Tribune " declared 
that " if the cotton States shall decide that they 
can do better out of the Union than in it, we 
insist on letting them go in peace. " Extremists 
like William Lloyd Garrison of course were de- 
lighted at the opportunity to free the Union from 



200 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

its slaveholding contingent; and thousands of 
Northern Kepublicans saw no legal or practicable 
way of resisting secession, however wrong it might 
be and- however disastrous it might prove. v ~ 

Chase meanwhile seemed to be waiting for some- 
thing. For many weeks he expressed no public 
opinion on the crisis ; but at last, on November 30, 
he wrote to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Hunt of New 
Orleans, a letter apparently intended for publi- 
cation, in which he said distinctly : " I abhor the 
very idea of a dissolution of the Union. If I were 
President I would indeed exhaust every expedient 
of forbearance consistent with safety. But at all 
hazards and against all opposition the laws of the 
Union should be enforced." These sentences in 
brief form describe Chase's line of policy down to 
the firing on Fort Sumter, a policy which involved 
concessions by grace of the new administration, but 
none by act of Congress. 

A new phase of the question was opened up 
when Congress met in December, 1860 ; for the 
responsibility of preserving the Union was then 
thrown jointly upon President Buchanan and the 
two Houses at Washington, with neither of which 
powers Chase had influence at that time. Seward, 
on the other hand, had been in conference with 
Lincoln, and on December 8 was notified that the 
secretaryship of state would be offered him. As a 
leading senator he played a large part in the first 
effort for a compromise ; an editorial in the 
Albany " Evening Journal " inspired by his inti- 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 201 

mate friend and manager, Thurlow Weed, strongly- 
urged compromise and a constitutional convention. 
During December an attempt was made to find 
some halfway point which would satisfy South 
Carolina and the other cotton States. A com- 
mittee of thirty-three in the House, appointed 
December 6, undertook the task, and on December 
13 voted to recommend "additional and more 
specific and effective guarantees of the constitu- 
tional rights of the South ; " but the next day 
thirty Southern members of Congress united in a 
public address, stating that in their judgment no 
compromise would be offered that the South could 
accept. No delay was effected in South Carolina, 
where on December 20 a convention declared the 
State no longer a part of the Union. 

The Senate Committee of Thirteen did not meet 
till December 21, and the only hope of compromise 
then was to make such an offer to the Southern 
members of that committee as would recall South 
Carolina. It fell to Seward to frame the Republi- 
can concessions. He agreed to an amendment to 
the Constitution denying the right of Congress to 
interfere with slavery in the States, and he was 
also willing to ask the repeal of the personal 
liberty bills ; but he would go no further, and 
coupled his proposals with a demand for a jury 
trial of alleged fugitives, a proposition very un- 
palatable to the South. The border- state men 
then proposed the Crittenden compromise, of 
which the essence was to fix slavery in all the 



202 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Territories south of 36° 30'. Though Seward's own 
judgment tended toward compromise, he refused 
to accept this plan, and we now know that he was 
carrying out the expressed wishes of Abraham 
Lincoln, and gaining his first experience of sub- 
ordination to the will of that masterful man. The 
committee broke up without result, and within five 
weeks six more States had seceded. 

In January, 1861, Chase at last found his bear- 
ings, for he was then approached by Lincoln upon 
the subject of taking a cabinet position. That he 
should expect such an offer was natural ; he stood 
for the principle of aggressive political anti-slavery, 
which had furnished a large element in the North- 
ern majorities ; he had a good reputation for polit- 
ical skill as well as for ability ; he was probably 
the most distinguished of the former Democrats 
then in the Republican party ; and he was one of 
the few leaders who had shown to Lincoln personal 
sympathy in his struggle with Douglas in 1858. 
Letters to three different friends, on November 10, 
1860, show that he had gone through the process 
of not definitely making up his mind to refuse 
cabinet office, long before Lincoln had come to the 
point of offering it to him ; and he had evidently 
decided that the secretaryship of state was suited 
to his powers, and would be a proper recognition 
of his services. It seems probable that he felt it 
to be prudent to keep silence during November, 
till Lincoln had declared himself on secession. 

On December 31 Lincoln at last decided to tele- 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 203 

graph Chase to visit him. The conference lasted 
two days, and was embarrassing to both. Lin- 
coln began by asking " whether you will accept 
the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, 
without, however, [my] being exactly prepared to 
make you that offer." Chase replied with good 
sense and good temper that, if Seward were to 
have the State Department, he should not refuse 
the Treasury for any reason of pique. When they 
parted, neither man stood committed; but there 
was a tacit understanding that Mr. Lincoln wanted 
Chase, and probably could have him if he insisted. 
Chase later wrote upon the qualified proposition : 
"Had it been made earlier and with the same 
promptitude and definiteness as that to Mr. Sew- 
ard, I should have been inclined to make some 
sacrifices." What was really accomplished was 
the bringing of both statesmen to an understanding 
with the future President; thenceforward Chase 
felt that he was included in the circle of Lin- 
coln's advisers and probable ministers. A few 
days after the interview he even took Seward so 
far into his confidence as to write that they had " a 
common interest ; " and eloquently counseled him 
and Thaddeus Stevens " to give countenance to no 
scheme of compromise " and to offer no " conces- 
sions of principle." 

The question before the country was no longer 
secession, for by the middle of January disunion 
was an accomplished fact; it was whether the 
border States could be kept in the Union. After 



204 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

January 1 the only hope of finding common ground 
for border-state loyal Democrats and Northern Ee- 
publicans was in Crittenden's compromise ; but on 
a test vote of January 16, 1861, the ^Republicans, 
who now had a majority in the Senate, refused to 
support the measure. Three days later, as a last 
step, the Virginia legislature called a " Peace Con- 
ference," to be held in Washington. Meantime 
Chase had set forth his solution of the difficulty in 
a phrase which rang throughout the country, " In- 
auguration first, adjustment afterwards ; " and as 
one of the Ohio commissioners to the Peace Con- 
ference, at last he had some opportunity to affect 
the settlement of the issue. In the Conference, 
which sat from February 4 to February 27, he was 
the leader of the non-compromisers. Nevertheless, 
for some weeks he had hopes of " an agreement 
on something which, without compromising our 
course or our party at all, will yet help to an 
amicable understanding." This "something" was 
a plan for a general constitutional convention, and 
its chief advantage was that it would postpone 
action till the new administration could be seated. 
Behind the plan of delay was a purpose eventu- 
ally to offer a scheme of concession, to be drawn 
up by the Kepublican administration as a peace 
offering ; but at no time in his public career did 
Chase more distinctly set forth the ultimate author- 
ity of the national government than in his one long 
speech in the Conference. " If the President does 
his duty," said he, " and undertakes to enforce the 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 205 

laws, and secession or revolution results, what then? 
War ! Civil war ! " The Conference took the 
line of concession by recommending to Congress 
an amendment substantially identical with the 
Crittenden compromise; it was a third time re- 
jected ; and the insoluble problem was turned over 
to Lincoln's administration. 

The two things for which the country now looked 
with eager interest were the inaugural address, as 
an earnest of the President's policy, and the list of 
his cabinet advisers, which would reveal the influ- 
ences in his administration. The address proved 
to be steadfast against a constitutional right of 
secession ; and the names of the members of the 
cabinet showed that the President would have good 
support in trying to save the Union. During the 
two months since Chase's interview with Lincoln 
in Springfield, he had never received a distinct pro- 
mise of the Treasury, though he was told at second 
or third hand that Lincoln had decided upon him. 
Meanwhile the friends of Cameron continued vig- 
orous efforts to set Chase aside, in order that 
their favorite might have the coveted Treasury 
portfolio. Chase was described as a free-trader, 
who could not be trusted to carry out the new Mor- 
rill protective tariff ; he was assailed as a former 
Democrat ; he was held up as the rival and enemy 
of Seward. Months afterward a correspondent 
described how, a few days before the inauguration, 
on Lincoln's refusal to strike Chase out of his list, 
Thurlow Weed came away in a rage, declaring 



206 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

that " Mr. Chase had been placed in the cabinet to 
control the patronage and appointments in the city 
and State of New York, to prevent Governor Sew- 
ard from controlling the appointments, and to de- 
prive him [Mr. Weed] of all power and influence." 

It may be doubted whether Lincoln insisted 
upon appointing Chase because he expected him to 
back up the anti-Seward men in New York ; but 
it is equally unlikely that he discovered in him the 
qualities of a great financier, or indeed that he felt 
any need of a great financier. It is more probable 
that he selected him as a representative of a large 
body of radical Republicans, as a strong rival for 
the nomination, and as one of those former Demo- 
crats whom he intended to use as a balance to the 
old Whigs in his cabinet, while at the same time 
he had a genuine respect for Chase's character and 
abilities. 

To the last moment Chase had no positive assur- 
ance that he would be appointed, and he was not 
consulted about the rest of the cabinet slate ; hence 
he could truthfully say that the sending his nomi- 
nation to the Senate was a surprise to him. How- 
ever honorable the secretaryship, his pride was 
hurt by the long delay ; and, like Seward, he hesi- 
tated to give up his safe senatorship without some 
guaranty as to the policy of the President. At 
any rate, he held off till Lincoln in a personal 
interview insisted that he should accept, and prob- 
ably gave him some assurance as to his purposes 
toward secession. Of the weight of financial re- 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 207 

sponsibilities which he was taking upon himself he 
seems to have had at the beginning no inkling, and 
there were many times during the next four years 
when he wished that he had retained his seat in the 
Senate. 

On the second day of the existence of the new 
cabinet, Elizur Wright wrote to Chase in praise of 
the inaugural address : " The whole drift shows 
that the new President's heart is in the right place, 
and that, though far in advance of the average 
North, he knows how to make it follow him." 
Before the North could follow, however, it was 
necessary to know who was the leader; and to 
several of the members of his own cabinet Lincoln 
seemed inferior to themselves in initiative, in abili- 
ties, in experience, in administrative powers, and in 
public confidence. 

For a month or more Seward continued to be- 
lieve that he was to be the head of the new admin- 
istration, an attitude which he had unconsciously 
assumed in the previous congressional discussions 
on compromise. During the weeks preceding Sum- 
ter, while Seward was testing the will of the Presi- 
dent, Chase set himself in a business-like fashion to 
the duties of his office. Many of his friends had 
predicted that he and Seward could not sit in the 
same cabinet ; but from the first the Secretary of 
the Treasury sought to establish friendly relations 
with the Secretary of State, and mutual friends 
were authorized to express good will. If Chase 
had any notion of controlling the President, it was 



208 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

not through personal ascendency : the most that 
he ever sought was to make the cabinet, as a board 
of advisers, more powerful than the President. 

The relation of the President with his seven 
adjuncts was first distinctly defined in their discus- 
sions on the status of Fort Sumter soon after the 
inauguration. All the government posts in the 
seceding section had been seized and occupied, 
except Fort Pickens, Key West and the Dry Tor- 
tugas, and Fort Sumter, which last was occupied by 
a garrison under Major Anderson. The authori- 
ties of South Carolina, and later those of the Con- 
federacy, had demanded the surrender of the forts, 
but had finally been induced to wait for the new 
administration; and Sumter, which commanded 
one of the few Southern cities, at once became the 
turning-point in the whole controversy. To yield 
it would be practically to acknowledge the success 
of secession ; to reinforce it would begin civil war. 

The appearance of three new Confederate com- 
missioners in Washington compelled Lincoln's at- 
tention. General Scott was consulted, and on 
March 11, 1861, he pointed out the military diffi- 
culties, and discouraged any attempt to retain the 
forts. It was in this exigency, on March 15, that 
the President took the written opinions of his 
advisers. The question which the President had 
to settle was really neither constitutional nor mili- 
tary nor political ; it was the state of mind of the 
Northern people ; and this no member of the cabi- 
net could ascertain, because the people themselves 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 209 

did not understand their own minds. On the 
critical question of relieving Fort Sumter, there- 
fore, only one of the seven, Montgomery Blair, 
expressed the opinion that it was worth while to 
put to a test the support which the nation might 
give to bold measures. Seward and Chase were 
at one in advising that no step should be taken 
which would lead to hostilities ; but Chase drew 
the deduction that the simple provisioning of a fort 
ought not to lead, and would not lead, to civil war. 

This was one of the few periods of wavering 
judgment in Chase's life. His best friends were 
overwhelming him with letters urging him to stand 
by Fort Sumter ; but he preferred another policy, 
which he expected to be effective in keeping the 
border States in the Union, and which he thus 
frankly explained in a letter of April 20, 1861 : — 

" True it is that before the assault on Fort Sum- 
ter, in anticipation of an attempt to provision fam- 
ishing soldiers of the Union, I was decidedly in 
favor of a positive policy and against the notion of 
drifting, — the Micawber-like policy of waiting for 
something to turn up. 

"As a positive policy two alternatives were 
plainly before us: 1. That of enforcing the laws 
of the Union by its whole power and through its 
whole extent ; or, 2. That of recognizing the organ- 
ization of actual government by the seven seceded 
States as an accomplished revolution, accomplished 
through the complicity of the late administration, 
and letting that Confederacy try its experiment of 



210 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

separation, but maintaining the authority of the 
Union and treating secession as treason every- 
where else. 

" Knowing that the former of these alternatives 
involved destructive war and vast expenditure and 
oppressive debt, and thinking it possible that 
through the latter these great evils might be 
avoided, and the Union of the other States pre- 
served unbroken ; the return even of the seceded 
States, after an unsatisfactory experiment of sepa- 
ration secured ; and the great cause of freedom and 
constitutional government peacefully vindicated, — 
thinking, I say, these things possible, I preferred 
the latter alternative." 

The error of judgment Was one from which Lin- 
coln alone, among the great statesmen of the pe- 
riod, was wholly free. He alone saw clearly at that 
time that secession must bring eventual war, and 
that the issue might as well be met at once, if only 
the Northern people could be roused to resistance. 
Chase's faint heart was speedily strengthened, for 
on March 29, on another call for opinions, he, as 
well as Welles and Blair, advised reinforcement at 
all hazards. Three days later Seward submitted 
to the President his " Scheme for Foreign Rela- 
tions," which in effect suggested that the President 
incite war on England and France, and give up to 
him the leadership of the administration. Lincoln 
quietly put aside this proposal that he abrogate his 
authority, and he made his own decision to try to 
throw provisions into Port Sumter. The intention 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 211 

Laving been communicated to the Confederate gov- 
ernment, on the morning of April 12, 1861, fire 
was opened on Fort Sumter. On the 14th it sur- 
rendered, and the dreaded Civil War had begun. 

The practical question whether the North would 
respond to a call to arms was answered once for 
all by the pouring forth of men in answer to the 
President's proclamation of April 15. The next 
problem to be faced was how an efficient army- 
could be organized and brought to bear for the 
confusion of the Confederacy. The regular army 
was small, scattered, unfitted for large operations, 
and weakened by the resignations of Southern 
officers. The question of financial ways and 
means was not so clearly critical throughout 1861 
as it became later ; and hence for many months the 
new Secretary of the Treasury felt quite as much 
responsibility for the army as for the Treasury, and 
put forth his greatest energies outside the bounda- 
ries of his own department. 

In part this martial activity of the civilian was 
displayed at his own suggestion, in part it was 
expected and encouraged by the President, in part 
it was necessary on account of the President's want 
of confidence in Cameron. Surely the numbers 
and organization of the army were within the 
province of the War Department; but when the 
President by a proclamation of May 3 called for 
42,000 three years' volunteers and for 41,000 reg- 
ular soldiers and sailors, he turned to Chase and 
not to the Secretary of War to frame the famous 



212 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

"Order No. 15 " and "Order No. 16," which organ- 
ized the new troops. When Congress reached the 
subject it legalized the President's extra-constitu- 
tional increase of the army, but it greatly altered 
and in Chase's opinion diluted the Orders. 

In his double labors the Secretary of the Trea- 
sury put forth his utmost strength. In May, 1861, 
he wrote : " In laboring for those objects, I know 
hardly the least cessation and begin to feel the 
weight as well as the strain of them. Would my 
criticisers equal me in labor and zeal, I should 
most cheerfully listen to their criticism." Cam- 
eron showed no resentment, and Chase was careful 
to cultivate his friendship, and continued to ex- 
press confidence in him long after the country was 
clamoring for the removal of the Secretary of War, 
and Chase's friends were begging him to take no 
more responsibility for a falling chieftain. 

A good reason for giving Chase an unusual 
responsibility was his recognized status as the 
representative of the West, and as especially qual- 
ified to deal with the Western border States. 
Though Bates came from Missouri, Chase through 
his anti-slavery correspondents in Missouri and 
Kentucky was better able than he to gauge the 
feeling of those two States, and to influence their 
destiny. He felt that he had a right to send to 
Lincoln a vigorous and sensible letter, begging 
him to use force to prevent the secession of Mary- 
land ; and in Virginia and West Virginia he exer- 
cised a semi-military responsibility. There are 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 213 

abundant evidences that he had special authority 
in the first months of the war to organize the West- 
ern troops and even to suggest their destination. 

To a West Virginian he writes, as by authority, 
promising to accept and maintain such troops as 
his correspondent may raise. He writes to Gen- 
eral Sherman as though the general were subject 
to his orders, promising commissions for his subor- 
dinates, and a supply of arms. To General Nel- 
son he writes : " I will go to the War Department 
at once on the subject of your wants, and do all I 
can to urge the department to action ; " and a little 
later : " As to popularity growing or diminishing 
I care little. I want to support everybody who 
has tried to do something." Toward McClellan 
he was at the beginning much attracted, and he 
assured the young commander that his commis- 
sion of major-general was in large degree due to 
his representations ; he even suggested a plan of 
campaign for him, and later wrote to him that 
"The army and the treasury must stand or fall 
together." In fact, until Stanton became Secre- 
tary of War, Chase continued to consider himself, 
and appears to have been considered by the Presi- 
dent, the special administrator of operations in the 
West. Perhaps he hoped to be Cameron's suc- 
cessor ; at any rate, in September he wrote to a 
friend : " Who is sufficient for the great work of 
the War Department ? I see and deplore its de- 
fective organization, but when I look around and 
ask myself who will bring to this great work the 



214 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

needed ability, or indeed more ability and fidelity 
than its present bead, I confess myself perplexed." 

Throughout the war Chase kept up his great 
interest in the conduct of the army, and he main- 
tained close correspondence with many of the com- 
manders, — at first with McClellan, later with 
Hooker, Lander, H. B. Carrington, Mitchell, Gar- 
field, McCook, W. B. Smith, Benham, and many 
others. Western officers and politicians were 
especially fond of seeking his military influence. 
Doubtless all the members of the cabinet were 
beset by requests for commissions and military 
favors, especially for paymasterships ; certainly 
they poured in upon Chase by hundreds. One 
man complains to him that others are promoted 
over his head ; another informs him that the gov- 
ernor of a Western State is " drunk and incapable 
all the time ; " another urges the immediate rais- 
ing of 300,000 men ; another wants Chase to con- 
trol the contracts for gunboats on Western rivers ; 
another pleads that General Lyon be kept in Mis- 
souri ; and another advocates a new government in 
West Virginia. 

In other fields of politics and administration 
Chase was much less interested than in the mili- 
tary department. Notwithstanding the threaten- 
ing aspect of foreign relations, he took but little 
part in external affairs, except to represent strongly 
to Seward that he expected a share of the foreign 
patronage ; he figured out that his State was en- 
titled to 33 of the 269 diplomatic places. He 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 215 

secured desirable berths for his own intimate 
friends, Richard C. Parsons and James Monroe, as 
consuls to Rio, and he influenced some diplomatic 
appointments. He even transmitted to the Presi- 
dent in October, 1861, a curious suggestion that 
" Honorable Andy Johnson " be sent over " to 
conciliate public opinion in England." Through- 
out the war, Chase had some special channels of 
foreign information through the letters of a shrewd 
correspondent, Mr. Wood, then our minister to 
Denmark, and through the impressions in foreign 
financial circles which came to him from time to 
time through New York bankers engaged in pla- 
cing American loans abroad. The one subject in 
foreign diplomacy in which Chase took a marked 
interest was the settlement of the Trent affair. 
In a cabinet meeting of December 26, 1861, he 
strongly urged the return of Mason and Slidell, 
on the ground " that the technical right was clearly 
on the side of the British government ; " and he 
had an honorable part in settling that controversy. 
The significance of the national finances was not 
felt by the secretary till December, 1861; but 
during the anxious earlier months of that year 
Chase found time to rehabilitate the disorganized 
and almost bankrupt Treasury, to make the neces- 
sary appointments, to come into relations with the 
capitalists of the country, to suggest new taxes, 
and to borrow the money necessary to carry the 
country through the first period of the war. In a 
letter of April 6 he writes: "Certainly I never 



216 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

worked nearly so hard before ; twice this week I 
have been at the department till after midnight 
from nine in the morning, with an interval for 
luncheon only. Every night except one I have been 
there till after ten." 

Hard work was necessary, first of all, in order 
to reorganize the personnel of the department, and 
to reform the complicated and inadequate system of 
accounts. Since the end of Robert J. Walker's 
term in 1849, there had been no efficient Secretary 
of the Treasury, and the whole civil service at 
Washington was demoralized by the breaking out 
of war, and the consequent resignation of many 
Southern clerks and officials ; while some who re- 
mained in office used their opportunities to send 
information to the enemy. It was necessary to 
purify the Treasury service ; and had it been less 
neeessary, no man could have altogether resisted 
the tremendous pressure for office which came upon 
Secretary Chase. The New York " Tribune " of 
March 9 said : " Chase intends to insist that the 
law requiring subordinates in his department [to] 
be examined before their appointment shall be 
strictly enforced ; and no applicant will be admit- 
ted to office without entire qualification. This rule 
will purge the public service of drones and incompe- 
tents." 

In making appointments, Chase in good faith 
sought to apply the system of pass-examinations, 
which had been set up under the act of 1853, and 
there were instances of appointees who were not 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 217 

allowed to qualify because of failure to pass. 
Nevertheless, large numbers of appointments were 
made on the personal judgment of the secretary 
himself ; and many others on political recommen- 
dations. Several heads of bureaus and some clerks 
were allowed to remain in service, and new bu- 
reaus were speedily organized, as the business of 
the department increased. Perhaps the most im- 
portant of the " hold-overs " was Mr. John J. Cisco, 
who at the express request of both Chase and Lin- 
coln continued as assistant treasurer in New York 
City throughout and beyond Chase's administra- 
tion. Out of one hundred and fifteen heads of 
custom-houses ninety were lopped ; and twelve of 
the fifteen naval officers, and every appraiser dis- 
appeared. Nearly all the subordinates of such 
officials went with them ; and where there were no 
removals, as fast as commissions expired new men 
were almost invariably appointed. 

The greatest prize within Chase's department was 
the collectorship of the port of New York, a place 
highly paid, honorable, and, through its large num- 
ber of employees, a means of affecting the politics 
of New York City and State. To this office Mr. 
Hiram Barney was speedily appointed. He had 
been one of the small circle of Chase men in New 
York in 1860 ; when the New York delegation came 
to the President with a slate of appointments, Lin- 
coln informed them that he had himself chosen to 
nominate Barney. This appointment was out of 
the regular course, for Barney was not in the favor 



218 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

of the Seward- Weed combination, and, on the other 
hand, he was not sufficiently active as a politician 
to please Mr. Chase's eager friends ; hence in the 
end it proved satisfactory to neither faction, and 
gave occasion for many bitter attacks upon the 
secretary. 

Long before the beginning of his administra- 
tion, Chase's intimates, his acquaintances, and 
sometimes his enemies, began to make suggestions 
to him as to appointments. Among them his far- 
sighted and public-spirited friend, Joshua Hanna, 
the Pittsburg banker, desired him to urge Lincoln 
to " inaugurate a new era in this government by 
selecting from among the business men of the 
country those best qualified, who would honestly 
and intelligently fill their several positions." The 
editors of the local party papers had a different set 
of principles, and clamored for office of every kind 
for themselves and their friends ; and almost every 
place in New York was hotly contested between 
"Weed and anti-Weed factions. 

As soon as Chase was settled, members of Con- 
gress began to insist that he should make no ap- 
pointments in their districts without their consent. 
Many of his political and personal friends fur- 
nished him with a variety of amusing reasons why 
they should have offices : one writes to ask for " a 
place in Abraham's bosom," and suggests the em- 
bassy to Chili ; another must be appointed because 
he cannot make a living in any other way ; another, 
because of his great public services ; another, be- 






THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 219 

cause Mr. Chase has in a moment of undue warmth 
offered him any office in his gift ; another because 
he is from Ohio ; another, because he will work up 
a presidential influence for the secretary ; another, 
a lady, asks a place for her son, because his father 
would have been competent had he lived. Chase 
got appointments in other departments for his old 
law partner, Ball, for his brother, and for other 
kinsmen, and he himself appointed many other old 
friends ; but the evidence shows that he made it a 
principle to recognize merit and efficiency, and was 
glad to find it among his own friends and adher- 
ents, all of whom were of course Eepublicans or 
strong war Democrats. 

The patronage of the Treasury, already large 
and to be increased by the creation of new and 
lucrative offices, was to an unusual degree left by 
Mr. Lincoln in the hands of his secretary. Occa- 
sionally a candidate appeared at the department 
with such a note from Mr. Lincoln as the follow- 
ing : " Ought Mr. Young to be removed ? And if 
Yea, ought Mr. Adams to be appointed? Mr. 
Adams is magnificently recommended, but the 
great point in his favor is that Thurlow Weed and 
Horace Greeley join in recommending him ; I sup- 
pose the like never happened before, will never 
happen again, so it is now or never. What think 
you ? " But the President very rarely pushed an 
appointment hard, or disregarded a recommenda- 
tion made by Chase. 

While the new men were fitting into their offices, 



220 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Chase began to reorganize the routine of his de- 
partment. He was always fond of arranging and 
analyzing, and showed an aptitude for distributing 
the work of his great office among the various 
bureaus. Himself untiring, he expected hard work 
from those about him. One of the great changes 
which he introduced into government business was 
the employment of women in the public service, 
first as counters of currency, later as assistants in 
many clerical occupations. But though he thus 
won the distinction of opening up an important 
line of employment to women, he very much dis- 
liked to do business with them, and hated to be 
made the object of their personal demands for ap- 
pointment or other use of his influence. 

Although the Treasury operations were larger 
during 1861 than ever before, the available me- 
thods were those which had always been employed 
whenever the expenditures outran the resources: 
loans, treasury notes, and delayed settlement of 
accounts. The panic of 1857 so cut down the in- 
come of the United States that it had to borrow to 
make up running expenses ; and by November, 
1860, the debt had risen to about 162,000,000. 
Impending secession reduced the credit of the gov- 
ernment, so that when, toward the end of 1860, 
Secretary Cobb advertised a loan of $10,000,000, 
only about $7,000,000 was taken, and on January 
1, 1861, in order to meet interest payments, money 
was borrowed on treasury notes at twelve per cent. 
The net result of these operations during the last 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 221 

four months of Buchanan's administration was an 
addition of $14,000,000 more of debt, with nothing 
to show for it. 

Chase was obliged to begin his administration by 
contracting new loans. April 2, 1861, he accepted 
tenders for $8,000,000 of six per cent bonds, 
ranging from par to 94 ; but on May 21, after the 
war had actually begun, he was obliged to borrow 
a further sum of $7,000,000 in six per cents, at 
rates from 93 to 85, besides issuing new treasury 
notes for present needs. 

The meeting of Congress in July, 1861, gave the 
secretary his first opportunity to suggest a financial i 
plan for the government, and to discover how much \ 
criticism and change he must endure from Con- 
gress before any efficient legislation could be had. 
At this time he desired authority to contract for only 
such loans as the country might speedily expect to 
extinguish. "The idea of perpetual debt," said 
he, " is not of American nativity and should not 
be naturalized." He therefore recommended such 
increased taxation as would raise the ordinary an- 
nual revenue of the government from $50,000,000 
to about $80,000,000, including a direct tax of 
$20,000,000, to be apportioned among the States, 
and an income tax of three per cent. He favored 
also an extensive measure of confiscation. All 
these measures were enacted by Congress ; but 
down to December, 1861, not more than $2,000,000 
was actually paid into the Treasury from direct 
taxation, and nothing from the income tax. 



222 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

The most important financial measures during 
the first year were arrangements for new loans, and 
the actual borrowing of money — both matters in 
which the brief legislation of Congress was very sig- 
nificant, for there was laid the foundation for large 
issues of bonds, of interest-bearing notes, and of 
circulating notes. During the short summer ses- 
sion, Chase was authorized to borrow an additional 
$250,000,000 in any or all the three forms, the non- 
interest-bearing notes not to exceed $50,000,000; 
and it was upon the basis of this authority that 
the funds necessary for the prosecution of the war 
during the second half of 1861 were obtained. 

One of the first steps taken by the new secretary 
was to seek the acquaintance of the financiers in 
Philadelphia, Boston, and especially New York. 
His retention of Mr. Cisco as local treasurer helped 
him to win the confidence of bankers ; and several 
of the metropolitan capitalists and bank presidents 
were Chase's personal friends, especially George 
Opdyke, later mayor of the city. Armed with his 
new authority from Congress, in July Chase had a 
conference with the heads of the banks in the three 
great financial centres, and arranged for the placing 
of 1150,000,000 of three-year treasury notes, bear- 
ing interest of seven and three-tenths per cent. 
Chase has left an account of the language in which 
he stated to the bankers the only alternative for this 
loan : " I was obliged to be very firm, and to say, 
' Gentlemen, I am sure you wish to do all you can. 
I hope you will find that you can take the loans 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 223 

required on terms which can be admitted. If not, 
I must go back to Washington and issue notes for 
circulation ; for, gentlemen, the war must go on 
until this rebellion is put down, if we have to put 
out paper until it takes $1000 to buy a breakfast.' [ 
This suggestion of government notes in denomina- 
tions and on terms which would cause them to cir- 
culate, was a threat of much import to the state 
banks ; but without it they stood ready cheerfully 
to take the first installment of 150,000,000 in seven 
and three-tenths per cent treasury notes. 

The money was spent almost faster than it was 
received, and a few weeks later Chase arranged 
for a second call of $50,000,000 on the same terms. 
But investors showed less confidence than the 
banks, and when a third call was made for $50,- 
000,000, the bankers could no longer advance upon 
the " seven-thirty " notes at par, and Mr. Chase 
reluctantly issued $50,000,000 in six per cent 
bonds at about 92. A part of his loan system had 
been the appointment of one hundred and forty- 
eight agents for the placing of the loan ; of these, 
only one, Jay Cooke of Philadelphia, distinguished 
himself by his success in distributing the treasury 
notes. Though the system of agents was for the 
time abandoned, his efficiency was not forgotten, 
and he later became Chase's special loan dis- 
tributor. 

Thus far, during the nine months of his stay in 
the Treasury, Chase had had little opportunity to 
show his qualities either as a great leader in the 



224 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Civil War or as an originator of schemes for 
finance. His military activity in the East was 
much diminished when McClellan was appointed 
to the command of the Army of the Potomac and 
began his system of military organization. After 
some attempts to form a friendship with the gen- 
eral, Chase found that he was little consulted on 
the affairs of the Eastern army. The question of 
slavery, in which Chase was by his history and his 
convictions a leader, was as yet kept in the back- 
ground, and national finance thus far had consisted 
in organizing the machinery of the Treasury, in 
taking up the small amount of available capital at 
high rates of interest or at a humiliating discount, 
and in issuing a few millions of so-called " demand 
notes," which circulated as currency, and were 
receivable for debts to the government. Had the 
war ended early in 1862, as was hoped, Chase 
would never have had an opportunity to show 
his powers as a financier, or to urge his banking 
scheme. So long as specie payments continued 
he had no harder task than that of several secre- 
taries of the Treasury before him. 

During 1861 began one of the peculiar functions 
of the Treasury which, though it went on through- 
out the war, may be conveniently discussed here. 
It has already been noted that Mr. Chase looked 
forward to a large income from the confiscation of 
the property of rebels : this measure seemed an easy 
mode of combining revenue with punishment. By 
the first confiscation act, August 6, 1861, the Pre- 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 225 

sident was authorized to seize any property used 
in promoting insurrection ; but it proved difficult 
to get legal proof against such property, and hence 
the act, in its practical application, had to do prin- 
cipally with slaves. A second act of July 17, 1862, 
authorized the taking of property belonging to 
civil and military officers of the Confederacy, or to 
any persons who had given aid and comfort to the 
rebellion. In both cases some kind of legal pro- 
ceeding was necessary for condemnation ; but as 
Federal lines were extended, plantations, buildings, 
live stock, and especially cotton, were often found 
without a visible owner ; and since this property 
was expected to come into the Treasury, it fell 
within the jurisdiction of Secretary Chase. By 
a series of orders, approved by the President, he 
made provision for the collection, sale, and record 
of such property; and in order to manage this 
immense business he was authorized to appoint a 
special body of Treasury agents, who followed 
close behind the armies, and sometimes went ahead 
of them. 

It was also the function of the Secretary of the 
Treasury to make and enforce regulations for ex- 
ternal commerce, so as to prevent goods sent out 
of the United States from finding their way eventu- 
ally to the enemy; and this important power 
was extended to the control of trade on the land 
border. Movements of trade which had been es- 
tablished half a century were interrupted by the 
war, and the traffic from Southern to Northern 



226 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Atlantic ports by sea was resolutely and completely 
suppressed ; but along the whole military land 
frontier from the James River to the mouth of the 
Mississippi, there was an unceasing effort to carry 
on traffic as if there were no war. On one side, the 
Northwestern States were cut off from their valu- 
able provision trade to the South ; on the other 
side, cotton accumulated behind the Confederate 
lines without any home market. Even within the 
Union lines the condition of the border States was 
desperate, for sympathizers with the South were so 
intermixed with loyal men, and the facilities for 
forbidden trade across the broken country which 
constituted the military frontier were so abundant, 
that it became necessary to regulate, and in some 
cases almost to cut off, the commerce of whole 
communities. Hence a great pressure was put 
upon the secretary to grant permits to furnish 
supplies for particular places and regions ; and 
rigorously limited permissions were given to fur- 
nish $5000 a month in drugs to such a city, and 
$10,000 in dry goods and groceries to such another. 
By a series of Treasury regulations in May and 
June, 1861, Chase directed the officials of his de- 
partment to refuse clearances to places within the 
hostile lines ; but under the act of July 13, 1861, 
the President was authorized to license commercial 
intercourse with parts of the seceded States, and 
the regulation of this trade was turned over to the 
Secretary of the Treasury. When he came to 
apply the principle in Kentucky and Missouri, 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 227 

Chase laid the foundation of a most bitter hostility 
to himself ; for the Ohio Kiver trade to all places 
on the south side of the stream was for some time 
prohibited, and the commerce of Louisville was 
checked ; while by cutting off the traffic down the 
Mississippi from St. Louis, the opposition of the 
business men of that city was roused. In New 
Orleans, under General Butler's rule, a brisk traffic 
began across the Gulf to the Confederacy, salt 
going in and cotton coming out ; and agents were 
despatched to bring down cotton from the tribu- 
taries of the Mississippi. 

Such a system of agents, acting so far from 
Washington and in the midst of war, was certain 
to lead to abuses ; for to the special agents of the 
Treasury had been given an authority independent 
of the military commanders, and capable of gross 
misuse. The confidential reports of several of 
Chase's agents are still in existence, and they show 
his own earnest desire that the business should be 
done honestly, and at the same time the impossi- 
bility of carrying it on at such a distance without 
fraud and corruption. 

The most profitable trade was in cotton and 
sugar. Cotton inside the Confederate lines was 
worth not more than ten cents in specie, but once 
on its way North or abroad it was worth seventy 
cents and upward. The temptation was too strong 
to be resisted. George S. Denison, collector of the 
revenue, Chase's confidential and upright repre- 
sentative in New Orleans, wrote him letter after 



228 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

letter about the trade across the border, which was 
going on under his own eyes, but which he could 
not check because it was authorized by the general 
in command. General Butler professed indigna- 
tion, and promised amendment ; but Mr. Denison 
reported — what everybody in New Orleans sus- 
pected — that the brother of the general was pro- 
fiting by this unwarrantable trade, and that the 
general winked at it. A statute of March, 1863, 
attempted to correct these abuses by affixing a pen- 
alty to the reception of anything which was brought 
out of the Confederacy except by the authorized 
agents of the Treasury ; and Chase followed up the 
statute by renewed regulations, approved from time 
to time by the President. In 1863 a comprehen- 
sive plan was drawn up by which the country was 
divided into special agencies with a hierarchy of 
agents. By the removal of persons proved to be 
unsound, Chase tried to check the corruption of the 
agents, and in September, 1863, after the capture 
of Vicksburg, he successfully resisted a committee 
from St. Louis backed by Attorney-General Bates, 
which demanded that the Mississippi be opened to 
trade throughout its length. 

The administration of the Treasury during the 
war has no more unsavory side than the scramble 
for permits and the collusion of military officers in 
getting out property from the enemy's lines; yet 
for no object did the secretary more honestly bestir 
himself than to regulate the trade. The circum- 
stances were too much for him, as they were for 



THE CRITICAL YEAR 1861 229 

the most upright commanders in the field. A few 
days before Chase's resignation in 1864, General 
Sickles wrote : " The real truth is that it has come 
almost to a direct trade with the enemy. In Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi and Arkansas 
immense quantities of merchandise go through our 
lines, often in unbroken packages." Though the 
Treasury was defeated in its effort to keep the 
trade in proper channels, it would be unjust to 
hold the secretary culpable. Chase could and did 
remove delinquent agents ; but he could not guar- 
antee that their successors would be proof against 
the temptations of their unrivaled opportunities. 

In later chapters the attempt will be made to 
describe Chase's financial policy. The fiscal and 
financial history of the Civil War is yet to be writ- 
ten ; but it is possible to show the plans, hopes, and 
fears of the secretary, to bring out the personal 
side of his administration, to discuss his problems. 
Throughout the financial chapters the reader will 
find useful the brief financial tables, printed as an 
appendix to this book. 



CHAPTER IX 

TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS, 1862-1863 

With the meeting of Congress in December, 
1861, there came upon Chase a new set of anxieties, 
both financial and political. Upon him lay the 
responsibility of suggesting a financial system 
which should keep up the government's credit on 
$267,000,000 of outstanding loans and notes ; which 
should provide at once for a deficit, already in- 
curred, of $143,000,000 ; and which should make 
possible the prosecution of the war upon the scale 
which it now assumed. It was his duty also to con- 
vince the capitalists of the country that his schemes 
would work ; and — perhaps more difficult still — 
he must persuade Congress of his superior wisdom. 

His first annual report appeared December 9; 
but before it could produce any effect, his hand had 
been forced by a crisis in the currency. The three 
successive interest-bearing loans of $50,000,000 
each had drawn heavily on the specie reserves of 
the country ; and at the same time, $27,000,000 
of treasury notes were in circulation as a currency, 
in competition with state bank notes. Feeling 
the drain upon their gold, the banks urged the gov- 
ernment to receive their bank notes for bonds, a 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 231 

proposition which meant that the state bank issues 
were to be bolstered up by government credit. To 
this suggestion Chase replied with firmness : " If 
you can lend me all the coin required or show me 
where I can borrow it elsewhere at fair rates, I will 
withdraw every note already issued, and pledge my- 
self never to issue another ; but if you cannot, you 
must let me stick to United States notes, and in- 
crease the issue of them just as far as the deficiency 
of coin may require." The real difficulty was not 
scarcity of specie, but a want of public confidence 
in the success of the war, which affected both the 
government notes and the new securities still held 
in large quantities by the banks. 

In 1812, in 1837, in 1839, and in 1857, the 
banks had all refused to redeem their own notes in 
specie, and it was plain that they were likely to 
suspend specie payment again. It was a painful 
suggestion to Chase, for he had insisted that no 
suspension would be necessary; but he had no 
power to control public confidence, and had made 
no preparations for such a crisis. On December 30 
all the banks by general agreement suspended pay- 
ment of their demand notes, and the government 
followed, with the result that after a few days a 
small premium was exacted for specie, gold became 
a commodity, and the government issues of notes 
and bonds began to decline in value. 

Looking backward over the experience of nearly 
forty years, it is easy to criticise the banks, the 
country, and the secretary for this suspension. 



232 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Ought not resolution, bold taxation, or loans at high 
interest to have held the country up to the specie 
standard ? So far as the previous experience of 
the United States shows, a suspension was inevi- 
table, and would have come about had there been 
no government circulating notes. But considering 
the special difficulties of the time, none but an 
extraordinary financier, a Hamilton, could have 
prevented this misfortune. The banks of issue 
had state charters, and were subject to no control 
and no penalties from the general government if 
they failed to redeem their notes. When the 
banks gave up specie for Chase's seven-thirty notes, 
they expressed their own confidence that the gov- 
ernment would punctually pay interest and princi- 
pal ; but so far as they held those notes, and had 
not sold them to investors, they were basing their 
own solvency on the national confidence that the 
government would speedily break down the South- 
ern Confederacy ; and neither banks nor investors 
were keyed up to the enormous expenditures which 
had begun to appear essential. 

The government notes affected the question of 
suspension indirectly, because they showed that 
borrowing had already begun to lag, and because 
the United States could not keep them afloat as a 
special gold-value currency; but the real reason 
for the suspension of specie payments was that no- 
body could see where the specie was coming from 
to keep up the reserves, in view of the probable 
demands by the federal government. Vigorous 






TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 233 

and immediate taxation would have checked the 
fall of paper money, but it could not have pro- 
vided for the expenses of 1862; and both pri- 
vate and public finance were disorganized for a 
time by the conditions of a civil war. Business 
was disconcerted by loss of foreign trade, by the 
closing of the Southern market, and by the can- 
cellation of most of the debts due from Southern 
merchants. 

As for the Treasury, in 1861 the administration 
had to feel its way ; it had not foreseen the neces- 
sary changes in its financial system, because it had 
not foreseen a long war. As yet there was no 
powerful syndicate of American money lenders to 
absorb loans or sell abroad; no machinery for 
placing popular loans ; no experience of the capa- 
city of the people for bearing taxation ; no know- 
ledge of the terrible war expenses which ate up 
the revenue long before it was available ; no suffi- 
cient understanding between secretary and Con- 
gress. The only thing of which Chase could feel 
reasonable certainty in December, 1861, was that 
the country would carry on the war through the 
next campaign ; the task of straightening out the 
national forces and causing them to run parallel 
was the work of many months to follow. 

Chase's position would have been stronger had 
the beginnings of a consistent financial system been 
presented to the July session of Congress ; but the 
finance of 1861 was practically a series of make- 
shifts. First, there were the scanty proceeds of 



234 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

peace taxes; then loans, till they broke the mar- 
ket ; then treasury notes, to tide over a few months. 
The crude devices of direct tax, of confiscation acts, 
and of income tax had as yet produced little ; and 
when in December, 1861, the secretary was ready 
with a comprehensive scheme — taxes, loans, notes, 
and banks — his plans were pushed aside by Con- 
gress, till the mischief of the suspension of specie 
payments had been done, and the Treasury was 
empty ; and then began a hurried course of legis- 
lation in which the plans of the secretary were 
treated with little respect. 

It was not in Chase's nature to be persuasive ; 
in all his public life his successes were those of the 
downright man, convincing without pleasing. Him- 
self a most capable legislator when in the Senate, 
he had little patience with slow intellects, and less 
of that urbane yielding of non-essentials which se- 
cures the adoption of the larger matters of principle. 
The Congress of 1861-63 was at best a body hard 
to conciliate ; the majority was made up of ele- 
ments suspicious of each other, and the eventual 
crystallization was around very aggressive men, 
like Wade and Thaddeus Stevens ; moreover, the 
temper of Congress shortly became so radical that, 
even on such a question as slavery, men like Chase 
were found among the conservatives. The lack of 
harmony between appropriations and "ways and 
means," which had been of small consequence be- 
fore 1861, became dangerous during the war ; for 
to vote supplies seemed a patriotic duty, to be per- 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 235 

formed instantly and without too much discussion, 
while the raising of money required long debates, 
and affected a member's popularity in his own dis- 
trict. 

To deal with Congress Chase needed lieutenants, 
and he never had them. Senator Fessenden of 
Maine was sincerely interested in financial ques- 
tions, and was as helpful as any member of Con- 
gress ; but Chase had few personal friends in either 
house and fewer spokesmen. He had to keep in 
relations with the Committee of Ways and Means 
of the House, and the Finance Committee of the 
Senate ; and he argued before them, button-holed 
members, wrote letters, placated them with minor 
appointments, and brought pressure to bear from 
constituents and newspapers; but he understood 
not the arts of lobbying, and he never could bring 
Congress to accept his financial scheme in an en- 
tirety, or any part of it without great modification 
of details. 

So far as expenditures went, Chase never had 
any control over them, and yet he was held respon- 
sible for at least the suggestions of means to meet 
them. An example or two will show how far out 
of the way his estimates sometimes were. In July, 
1861, it seemed to him safe to predict that the 
expenditures for the fiscal year 1861-62 would be 
1318,000,000; but the revised estimates in De- 
cember were $543,000,000, and the actual sum 
eventually shown to have been expended was $475,- 
000,000. For the year 1862-63 the secretary 



236 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

estimated 1475,000,000, and in the end paid out 
$715,000,000. Both the committee system and the 
exigencies of the war made it impossible for Chase 
to impress upon Congress a conviction that he had 
a firm grasp of the problems of national finance. 

All the elements of Chase's whole system of 
finance are to be found in his careful report of 
December, 1861. In expenditure he urged an 
economy which he was never able to secure. For 
receipts he recognized five possible sources : taxa- 
tion, time loans, confiscation of property of the 
insurgents, treasury notes to be issued for brief 
periods on interest, and demand notes circulating 
as currency ; out of these sources he meant soon 
to eliminate the government notes of both kinds, 
except for temporary uses ; and he intended to rely 
on taxation, long loans, and confiscation. The ques- 
tions which most exercised his mind were : in what 
proportion to use loans and taxes, and how to find 
a market for his loans ? The force of circum- 
stances, however, speedily forced upon him as his 
main resources short term loans bearing high in- 
terest ; and treasury notes, circulating as currency, 
irredeemable, and a legal tender. 

At the moment, the most serious problem seemed 
to be whether the Treasury should rely on heavy 
taxation to furnish a considerable part of its rev- 
enues, to create confidence in the payment of inter- 
est, and to form the basis of a sinking fund for 
the bonds. Chase did not in either 1861 or 1862 
urge high taxation, and in December, 1863, he very 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 237 

distinctly stated his reasons. "I can see clearly 
that we can go no further without heavy taxation ; 
and he has read history to little purpose who does 
not know that heavy taxes will excite discontent." 

The experience of 1864 and 1865 proved that the 
country could pay enormous taxes ; hence it is a 
serious question whether Chase ought not to have 
made taxation the basis of his whole scheme. It 
must not be forgotten how unused people were 
to any national taxes except indirect customs, 
and how light even state and local taxation had 
been for many years. From 1837 to 1861 the na- 
tional revenue was practically derived from import 
duties, except a few millions from public lands. 
The excise had twice been laid, but the second ex- 
cise expired in 1817, and it had always been a very 
unpopular impost. No direct tax had been levied 
since the War of 1812, and it was a device which 
bore hardest on the poorest communities. Chase's 
political instincts were against high protective du- 
ties, and Congress never knew how to force up the 
tariff to a basis which would be productive and yet 
not impair its revenue capacity. The strongest 
reason for holding off from war taxation in 1861 
was the expectation that the war would be over 
in twelve months; Chase hesitated, and Lincoln 
hesitated with him, to lay a permanent war tax, 
and both deliberately faced the prospect of going 
through the calendar year 1862 chiefly on loans 
and on the expected proceeds of confiscations. 

In his report Chase expressly disclaimed a pur- 



238 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

pose of depending on government circulating 
notes. He expected to borrow, but on obligations 
running many years, and lie brought forward in 
its first form his great project for a system of na- 
tional bank corporations, which should give the 
country a stable currency and at the same time 
become large lenders to the government. To his 
mind the new banks were to be the keystone of 
his financial arch ; they were to interest the finan- 
ciers in the success of the government, to take 
away the competition between state bank notes 
and government issues, to absorb and sell the gov- 
ernment securities, and to replace the temporary 
treasury notes. 

As soon as the recommendations of the secre- 
tary were sent to Congress it became evident that 
that body was little disposed to follow his lead. 
The customs duties had produced $64,000,000 in 
1856-57, but only $40,000,000 in 1860-61. The 
Morrill tariff took effect April 1, 1861 ; but as it 
could be applied only to the loyal States, on Chase's 
recommendation a special act of August 5 had 
imposed revenue duties on tea, coffee, sugar, and 
molasses ; and on December 24, also on Chase's 
suggestion, Congress further raised those rates so 
as to add at once to the revenue. As new sources 
of revenue, Chase proposed direct, income, and in- 
ternal taxes to the amount of $50,000,000 a year, 
which, with the increased customs, would make an 
income of $90,000,000. 

Although he apologized for asking such large 






TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 239 

sums, Congress parted from him at this critical 
moment, and under the leadership of Thaddeus 
Stevens the House directed the Committee on 
Ways and Means to lay new taxes which should 
produce $150,000,000. But if Chase asked less 
than the country was willing to give, at least he 
wanted speedy action ; and Congress let six months 
slip away before the comprehensive internal revenue 
act of July 1, 1862, was passed. In this statute a 
large number of articles, processes, and evidences 
of wealth were included ; and a necessary part of 
the scheme was a new tariff, by which additional 
duties were placed on imported goods, to corre- 
spond with the new burdens placed on American 
manufactures. This act required a wholly new 
and very elaborate machinery, which could not be 
improvised. Hence the net result of the disregard 
of the secretary's suggestion was that during the 
fiscal year 1861-62 he had no income from new 
taxation except driblets from the direct tax to the 
amount of about 12,000,000 ; and in 1862-63 he 
got less than $40,000,000 from new taxes, while 
the tariff receipts for that year were hardly greater 
than for 1856. Chase's own modest plan would 
have yielded from $60,000,000 to $70,000,000 a 
year during the same period, with an immediate 
good effect on the public credit. 

The full influence of the legislation of 1862 was 
not felt till the fiscal year 1863-64, when customs 
and internal revenue raised the income at last to 
more than the $200,000,000 which Chase had ex- 



240 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

pected in 1862, and with the aid of $30,000,000 of 
confiscations the revenue ran up to 1260,000,000. 
In 1864-65, after Chase's retirement, the taxes rose 
to $300,000,000, and in 1865-66 to $490,000,000 ; 
and the country from which Chase hesitated to ask 
$90,000,000 in December, 1861, five years later 
furnished $570,000,000 to the federal treasury, 
besides tremendous sacrifices of men and money. 

It would not be fair either to the secretary or to 
Congress to think the conditions of 1866 like those 
of 1861. Flush times, sudden revival of business, 
resumption of immigration, national self-confidence, 
the restoration of the South, had by that time 
taken the place of distress and forebodings. Chase 
might have struck a higher note in his policy of 
taxation, and every dollar raised in 1862 would 
have saved three dollars in 1864 ; but he had an 
intelligent plan of successive increases of taxation, 
which would have accustomed the country to the 
machinery of collection, while the congressional 
system of taxes was slow at a critical time, and in 
the end bore harder than was intended. 

In all the previous crises in the finances of the 
United States, — 1776, 1794, 1812, 1837, 1842, 
1857, — taxation had been both inadequate and 
slow ; and three other means of raising money had 
been employed, — temporary loans, funded loans, 
and a form of paper currency. The easiest method 
was to issue the so-called " treasury notes," usually 
in large denominations and bearing interest. They 
were used to satisfy for the time being the claims 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 241 

of contractors, and also to attract idle capital, 
since they had commonly but a few months to run, 
and were as sound as any security in the country. 
They were almost always treated as an investment, 
and did not circulate except among banks and capi- 
talists. 

Chase found outstanding when he came into 
office more than $10,000,000 in one-year notes; 
and he also found authority, by an act of March 2, 
1861, to issue more treasury notes ; and before De- 
cember 1, 1861, he had put out $22,000,000 of two- 
year notes, besides a large amount of very short- 
term notes, which were redeemed as they fell due. 
Under the discretion given him by the statutes, he 
revived a form of note devised in the "War of 
1812, — a 7 t 3 q- per cent three-year "bond," as he 
called it, issued in denominations of $50 and up- 
wards. The rate of interest was high ; it was easy 
to calculate, and it was hoped that the people 
would hoard the notes : as a matter of fact they 
were taken chiefly by banks and large investors. 
In July, 1865, $810,000,000 of these notes were 
outstanding, and they were not all extinguished 
till 1870. 

Several other forms of temporary obligations 
were worked out by the ingenious secretary : such 
were the ordinary one-year and two-year notes at 
five per cent and six per cent interest; "certifi- 
cates of indebtedness," bearing six per cent and 
running a year; and "temporary loans," payable 
on ten days' notice, with four per cent, five per 



242 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

cent, or six per cent interest, — a very popular 
method of obtaining interest on temporary deposits. 
A favorite form with Chase was the "demand 
notes," as issued under acts of July 17 and Au- 
gust 5, 1861, the authority to terminate December 
31, 1862. These were in denominations as low as 
five dollars, bore no interest, and were not legal 
tender ; eventually they reached 160,000,000, but 
they were superseded by the legal tenders and re- 
tired in 1862 and 1863. The demand notes were 
the forerunners of the United States paper cur- 
rency, or " greenbacks," and were from the first 
intended to circulate side by side with state bank 
notes. Even after the suspension of specie pay- 
ments they stood at par in gold, because they were 
receivable for customs. 

The whole system of short loans was an unfortu- 
nate makeshift. Since it was impossible to foresee 
expenses a year ahead, Chase's budgets were all 
estimates. What he did was to raise all the money 
he could, in every possible way ; to refund his tem- 
porary loans into bonds, so far as he could, and 
then to resort to new short loans for pressing 
needs. When everything else failed he issued 
more legal tenders. 

In December, 1861, the funded debt of the 
United States (not including notes) was $280,- 
000,000, of which about $200,000,000 had been 
contracted since March, 1861. While the question 
of taxes was pending, and indeed during the many 
months before they could become productive, 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 243 

Chase was by the necessities of the case obliged to 
put forth new issues of bonds. The second great 
loan act, February 25, 1862, authorized the issue 
of $500,000,000 in the so-called "five-twenty" 
bonds. Chase himself proposed the two limitations 
in the issue — the fixing of the interest at six per 
cent, and the payment of interest in gold. A 
twenty-year bond at such rates of interest as were 
usual in the country during the Civil War should 
have been a good investment ; but neither of the 
two provisions worked as had been expected. To 
furnish the specie for the interest the import 
duties were levied in gold, a provision reasonable 
in itself and helpful to the Treasury ; but the bonds 
would not sell at par on a specie basis, because 
the investing public in the United States and 
abroad thought six per cent too little for the risk ; 
and by making the legal tenders convertible into 
the bonds, Chase did not raise the credit of the 
notes, and did inevitably depress the price of his 
bonds to par in greenbacks. The continued effect 
of these causes was that large blocks of Civil War 
bonds were sold at gold values of 50 or even 40, 
on which was paid an interest which, measured in 
greenbacks, was 12 per cent to 15 per cent, with 
the obligation of eventually redeeming in full in 
gold. The purchaser of a "ten-forty" five per 
cent bond in 1864 had therefore virtually a 20 
per cent investment for at least ten years. 

In placing the bonds, Chase wisely determined 
not to depend longer upon banks, but to put the 



244 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

whole matter in charge of a general agent. The 
person selected for this important national service 
was Jay Cooke, a man of great energy, which he 
infused into local agencies established with banks 
and bankers throughout the United States. But 
in order to place the bonds at all, it was necessary 
to allow a commission of three-eighths of one per 
cent; which, however moderate in itself, was a 
monopoly privilege, and caused plenty of hard 
feeling and some reflections on the secretary. 
With every exertion, the actual subscriptions to 
permanent loans during 1862-63 amounted to only 
$175,000,000, while the taxes produced only $111,- 
000,000; the expenditures were $704,000,000, 
leaving $418,000,000 to be raised by temporary 
loans and paper money. For two years, from 
July, 1861, to July, 1863, the total expenditures 
were $1,189,000,000, the receipts from taxation 
$163,000,000, and from funded loans only $235,- 
000,000. This leaves $791,000,000, or more than 
two thirds of the whole, which had to be made up 
by temporary loans of various kinds and by legal 
tender notes which were a forced loan. In the 
next year, 1863-64, much of the floating obligation 
was at last funded, and the rising taxes came to 
the relief of the government, so that when Chase 
went out of office, in July, 1864, he left a funded 
debt of $769,000,000, short-term debts of $516,- 
000,000, and paper currency to the amount of 
$455,000,000. This was simply hand to mouth 
finance, issues of notes from time to time making 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 245 

up for fluctuations in the various forms of tem- 
porary debt ; and the proceeds of loans anticipated 
long before they were paid in. 

Except certain one, two, and three year interest- 
bearing legal tender notes first authorized March 
3, 1863, the obligations just described might be 
refused by any creditor of the government who did 
not choose to accept them ; and the early demand 
notes were the only ones that freely circulated 
during 1861. But in November, 1861, Chase was 
cogitating a larger issue of some kind, and he said 
to the banks : " You ask me to borrow the credit 
of local banks in the form of circulation. I prefer 
to put the credit of the people into notes and use 
them as money." 

The necessity for some kind of regular currency 
had been felt throughout 1861, when the Western 
bank circulation was giving way ; and it was ac- 
cented in January, 1862, when the specie began to 
disappear from circulation. The state bank notes 
then amounted only to $184,000,000, which was 
not sufficient for the needs of the country ; and 
many of them were of doubtful value. The pa- 
tient secretary was at once beset by all sorts of 
wild schemes for replacing or supplementing them 
by a government currency. One friend suggested 
circulating notes with accumulating interest at 
3^5^ p er cen t ; another proposed a system of gov- 
ernment notes redeemable in land ; another thought 
that the United States should take up the outstand- 
ing bank paper; and others that the secretary 



246 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

should ask for authority to issue legal tender gov- 
ernment notes. For some months the premium on 
gold was very slight, but after the military disas- 
ters of July, 1862, the United States notes sank 
to 84 per cent, measured in specie. 

Two rival plans now presented themselves to 
Congress. Mr. Chase was willing to issue large 
amounts of demand notes, taking the chances of 
their deterioration; on the other hand, Judge 
Spaulding, the chairman of the sub-committee of 
the Committee of Ways and Means, was convinced 
that the only way to sustain such issues was to 
make them legal tender. After a long fight in 
Congress, an act was passed on February 25, 1862, 
authorizing the issue of $150,000,000 in notes, to 
be reissued as they were presented for redemption, 
"and to be lawful money and a legal tender in 
payment of all debts, public and private, within 
the United States, except duties on imports and 
interest on the public debt." The country was 
thus committed to a policy of government legal 
tender notes, and throughout the war, whenever 
taxes and loans proved insufficient, recourse was 
always had to this expedient ; when the war ended, 
$431,000,000 of these legal tender notes were in 
circulation. As silver suddenly disappeared from 
circulation, acts of July 17, 1862, and March 3, 
1863, authorized also the issue of fractional cur- 
rency in paper, and the amount eventually reached 
145,000,000. 

No act in Chase's life has caused so much dis- 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 247 

cussion as his attitude on the legal tenders ; he 
has been held up to odium as yielding to a pressure 
from an uninformed Congress, which he might have 
safely resisted. In his report of December, 1861, 
he had dwelt upon the dangers of a national paper 
currency, even without the legal tender quality, 
saying that " in his judgment possible disasters so 
far outweigh the probable benefits from the plan, 
that he feels himself constrained to forbear recom- 
mending its adoption." Judge Spaulding pre- 
pared the draft of a statute to authorize in terms 
the issue of legal tender notes, and thereby raised 
the question of constitutionality ; whereupon Attor- 
ney-General Bates gave the informal opinion that 
Congress had the power to issue legal tenders. 
Chase saw that Congress was outrunning his 
recommendations, and he called a conference of 
bankers and members of the committees of Con- 
gress to find some counter plan upon which all 
might combine. On January 15 the representa- 
tives of the banks agreed to a plan which was to 
relieve the country from the necessity of a legal 
tender act ; but on January 22, when the currency 
bill was sent to Chase for his comments, he had 
no argument to make against the legal tender 
clause further than to express the regret that it 
was considered necessary ; thenceforth the oppo- 
nents of the measure were deprived of his power- 
ful influence. On a test vote in the House, the 
legal tender clause stood 93 to 53 ; and on Feb- 
ruary 4 Chase gave up the struggle, " on condition 



248 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

that a tax adequate for interest and sinking fund 
and the ordinary expenditures be provided, and 
that a uniform banking system be authorized." 

The responsibility for the issue of legal tender 
notes, and especially for the continued and exces- 
sive issue, is difficult to place. It has often been 
urged that by insisting on high taxation and by 
issuing demand notes without the legal tender 
quality, the war might have been fought through 
without recourse to this expedient. The responsi- 
bility for the delay in new taxes certainly lies 
with Congress, or perhaps with the administration 
as a whole, rather than with the secretary ; though 
it must not be forgotten that the new taxes of 1862 
were supposed to be severer than they proved, for 
all authorities much overestimated their probable 
proceeds. When their inadequacy was seen in 
1863, Chase urged " the enactment of such laws as 
will secure the increase of the internal revenue to 
the amount originally estimated, of $150,000,000 
a year." From the tariff alone adequate revenue 
was not to be expected ; for Congress was much 
more disposed to add to the protective than to the 
revenue schedules. The real difficulty, so far as 
taxation was concerned, was the continued under- 
estimate of the probable duration of the war, and 
the lack of experience of the ability of a prosperous 
and energetic people to bear the burdens of a long 
conflict. Without high taxes to give a basis for 
the credit of the government, borrowing was diffi- 
cult and the time loans expected in 1862 could not 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 249 

be obtained in sufficient sums. There was plenty 
of capital, as was shown by the large temporary 
deposits with the government, but the capitalists 
had many profitable investments before them, and 
felt doubtful of the outcome of the war. So far 
as taxation is concerned, Chase showed little initia- 
tive, and as a consequence, lost his leadership at 
the outset. 

Nobody then or since has been able to point out 
a way whereby the issue of government notes of 
some kind might have been averted. There was, 
however, a very strong objection to giving them 
the legal tender quality, although the idea was by 
no means new, and was proposed in Congress about 
the end of the War of 1812. Chase had evidently 
been turning the objections to the plan over in his 
mind, for on June 3, 1861, a friend sent him a 
scheme for legal tender notes redeemable in gold, 
silver, or interest-bearing treasury notes ; but the 
secretary's instincts were against any system which 
stretched the national powers and impaired preex- 
isting contracts. For two months before the act 
passed he stood out against a legal tender clause, 
first by direct argument, then by trying to organize 
a counter scheme, and finally by refusing to give 
his influence in favor of the plan ; but as has been 
seen, his arguments did not convince Congress, his 
counter scheme did not satisfy the bankers, and in 
the end the clause was put into the bill whether he 
would or no. 

Undoubtedly it was the duty of a finance minis- 



250 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ter to lead, and of Congress to defer, in such a 
discussion as that on legal tenders ; but if Chase 
ever thought of appealing to the country over the 
head of Congress, he quickly gave up the idea; 
for when the question came to the test, he found 
against him, not only the Committee on Ways and 
Means, but the great banking interests of the coun- 
try ; and the imperious need of speedy provision 
for the Treasury did not allow delay. Chase was 
simply overborne by the weight of his counselors, 
and further opposition would only have emphasized 
his defeat. 

Besides the testimony of shrewd observers at 
the time, there are still in existence letters from 
many bankers and business men in all parts of the 
country, and especially in New York, Philadelphia, 
and Boston, insisting on the legal tender clause. 
Among these men were Assistant Treasurer John 
J. Cisco ; and George Opdyke, who in an elaborate 
memorial of January 28, 1862, set forth the argu- 
ment that the legal tender clause would strengthen 
the interest-bearing securities of the government, 
and urged that without it the government would 
soon be unable to purchase supplies for the army 
or to keep its bonds from a rapid fall. Another 
phase of the question is set forth in a letter from 
T. C. Henry of Philadelphia, who insisted upon 
a legal tender quality in order to prevent the gov- 
ernment notes from sinking below bank paper ; for 
some of the banks at this time adopted the ill- 
timed practice of refusing to take the demand 



TAXATION, LOANS, AND LEGAL TENDERS 251 

notes in ordinary deposits, with a view to show 
that the credit of their own notes was better than 
that of the Treasury ; while other concerns, espe- 
cially the savings banks, were furious at this at- 
tempt to throw them back upon wholly irredeem- 
able bank notes. A few men, like William Welsh 
of Philadelphia, urged the secretary not to yield 
the point ; but had he continued to hold out against 
Congress, he would have parted company with the 
men through whom alone he could expect to place 
loans. He yielded, not to an uninformed Con- 
gress, but to the wisest men with whom he could 
consult; and he yielded because he expected to 
hold the legal tender notes near par. 

The constitutional question played a great part 
in the debates in Congress, giving rise to indignant 
remonstrances and denunciations ; but this side of 
the problem seems at the time to have had less 
weight in Chase's mind than the disorganization 
of contracts and the danger of a depreciated cur- 
rency. In his thought this latter danger was to 
be removed by his national bank project, through 
which a new and sound currency was speedily to 
take the place of the government issues. He and 
his friends expected a moderate issue of the new 
notes to tide the government over until the rising 
flood of taxes, the large subscriptions to loans, and 
the credit of national banks should make it possi- 
ble to refund the notes and at the same time to 
meet the expenses of the government. 

It is remarkable that Chase did not foresee the 



252 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

two interactive features of the legal tender act 
which gave him much trouble in the long run, 
namely, the coin duties, and the conversion of legal 
tenders at par into six per cent, bonds. Since 
gold was necessary for the payment of duties, it 
must be had by the importers at any price, and 
the arrangement therefore lent itself to a specu- 
lation in gold, which was really a speculation in 
depreciation of the legal tender notes. But, on the 
other hand, the scheme was really a somewhat 
clumsy system of redemption, since the holder of 
legal tenders could always turn them into a coin- 
bearing security. 



CHAPTER X 

SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 

Toward the end of 1861 slavery became the 
central point, both of divergence between parties 
and of differences within the parties ; and there- 
after the question became more and more momen- 
tous, till it culminated in the second Emancipation 
Proclamation of January 1, 1863. From that time 
on, the anti-slavery forces were in the ascendant, 
and did not rest till in March, 1865, the Thirteenth 
Amendment to the Constitution was laid before 
the state legislatures. 

At the beginning of the war the Eepublican 
party was not an anti-slavery party, its most ad- 
vanced principle being that no new slave Territo- 
ries or slave States should be permitted ; and in 
the tumultuous tides of public feeling after the fir- 
ing on Fort Sumter, the greatest efforts were made 
to prevent the slave question from coming to the 
front. At least four different elements may be 
distinguished in the supporters of Mr. Lincoln's 
administration : first, the anti-slavery Republi- 
cans, of whom Chase was the only distinct repre- 
sentative in the cabinet ; second, the moderate 
Republicans, of whom a type, if not a leader, was 



254 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Seward ; third, the war Democrats, at first headed 
by Stephen A. Douglas, who offered his personal 
support and aid to the President, and who, with 
his followers, believed and expected that the war 
would be finished without affecting slavery in 
the States ; fourth, the loyal border-state men, 
many of them slaveholders, represented in the 
South by Crittenden, and in the cabinet by Bates 
and Montgomery Blair. Such men adhered to the 
Union under the assurance that their property 
rights would be safeguarded. 

To reassure both war Democrats and border- 
state men, the House of Representatives, on the 
day after the battle of Bull Run, by a vote of 107 
to 2, passed the following resolution : " Resolved 
by the House of Representatives of the Congress 
of the United States, That the present deplorable 
civil war has been forced upon the country by the 
disunionists of the Southern States, now in arms 
against the constitutional government, and in arms 
around the capital ; that in this national emer- 
gency Congress, banishing all feelings of mere 
passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty 
to the whole country ; that this war is not waged 
on their part in any spirit of oppression, or for any 
purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of 
overthrowing or interfering with the rights of es- 
tablished institutions of those States, but to defend 
and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution 
and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, 
equality, and rights of the several States unim- 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 255 

paired, and that as soon as these objects are accom- 
plished the war ought to cease." 

In most of the States an attempt was made to 
find a common political ground for Republicans, 
and for those war Democrats who could not accept 
the party designation of their former opponents. 
Throughout 1861 and 1862 this fusion was kept 
up, and in 1863 for a time took the name of 
Union Party. Not until 1864 did the Republican 
party again come forward as an entirely independ- 
ent organization, and rid itself of such of the 
remaining war Democrats as preferred to return to 
their own Democratic organization. 

That the war might be fatal to slavery was, 
however, evident to some minds from the first ; and 
in April, 1861, a correspondent pointed out to 
Chase the precise method which was to be the solu- 
tion of the question. " Why should not this ad- 
ministration place itself upon the construction 
given to the Constitution by John Quincy Adams, 
that the state of war would confer a constitutional 
power upon the government to proclaim emancipa- 
tion ; then declare the seceded States in a condi- 
tion of rebellion, and by a proclamation of 
emancipation obtain a power over the subject race 
to assist in the restoration of order in the rebellious 
States ? " 

At that time Lincoln was not ready to take up 
either the idea of emancipation by proclamation or 
the enlistment of negro troops ; he still believed 
that the solution was to be emancipation by the 



256 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

voluntary action of the States, through the assist- 
ance of the general government. Throughout 1861 
his mind dwelt on schemes for compensated eman- 
cipation and the deportation of the freedmen to 
some other part of the world, schemes which had 
been favorite ideas with him for ten years ; and 
nothing but the relentless logic of events convinced 
him that more violent methods were both possible 
and desirable. 

The hostilities of 1861 brought out several points 
of altercation concerning slaves, especially the con- 
fiscation of slaves belonging to rebel masters and 
the status of fugitives who had come within the 
Federal lines. It was a grief to Chase that he 
could not support General Fremont's proclamation 
of August 30, 1861, which declared free the slaves 
of all persons in the State of Missouri who were 
taking an active part with the enemy in the field. 
Chase defended the action of the President in an- 
nulling this pronunciamento, partly on the technical 
grounds that the recent confiscation act of Congress 
had limited the confiscation of slaves to such ne- 
groes as had actually been used in the rebellion, 
and partly because, as he wrote, " I am sure that 
neither the President nor any member of his ad- 
ministration has any desire to convert this war for 
the Union and for national existence . . . into a 
war upon any state institution." 

Butler's shrewd solution of the fugitive question 
in May, 1861, held the negroes who had come 
within his lines to be " contraband of war ; " this 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 257 

declaration had Chase's sympathy and support, and 
on October 8 he took the unusual step of sending 
to the " National Intelligencer " a leading article, in 
which he approved using the service of the fugitive 
negroes in the same way in which it had been em- 
ployed on the other side ; but suggested that in the 
end such persons ought to be transported to some 
tropical region, in order that " all injurious influ- 
ence from their emancipation would be averted, 
while loyal masters, provided that they remain 
loyal, can be, and doubtless will be, fully indemni- 
fied." 

The same Congress which in 1861 and in 1862 
showed a disposition to make a financial policy of 
its own, also outran the President and his cabinet 
on the question of slavery. On December 16, 1861, 
a bill was offered for the total abolition of slavery 
in the District of Columbia, and on April 16, 1862, 
the act was passed, including a compensation to the 
owners. As a consequence the three thousand 
slaves in the District were shortly emancipated at 
a cost to the government of about $1,000,000. 
The District of Columbia act was an assertion of a 
constitutional right which had always been claimed 
by the North; but before that bill became law 
another proposition was introduced, nominally " to 
render freedom national and slavery sectional," 
but really to put into practice, in defiance of the 
Dred Scott decision, the doctrine that Congress 
could and should prohibit slavery in the Territories. 
Eventually this bill became a statute, prohibiting 



258 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

slavery and involuntary servitude in all the Terri- 
tories of the United States then existing or which 
thereafter might be formed. On July 17 a second 
confiscation act provided that the disloyalty of a 
master should be a bar to any legal proceedings 
which he might bring to claim the service of his 
slave. By another statute, officers of the army 
were forbidden to render any assistance in the 
return of fugitives even to loyal masters. 

Though slavery was undermined by this series of 
acts, all passed within a year from the beginning 
of active hostilities, it still remained legal in the 
loyal border States, and the machinery of the Fugi- 
tive Slave Act of 1850 was in operation ; while 
slaveholders in the seceded States remained in legal 
possession of their slaves, provided the masters had 
taken no actual part in the war. Nevertheless, on 
both sides of the military lines the institution was 
disorganized and in danger ; thousands of negroes 
flocked to the camps from the border States, and 
in the disturbed conditions of the time could not 
be recovered by their masters; other thousands 
found their way out of the Confederacy across the 
front, and gathered about the headquarters of the 
Northern armies. 

By this time Chase had come forward as the 
leading anti-slavery spirit in the cabinet, and 
sought an opportunity to make his principles felt. 
Through his functions as the head of the department 
which dealt with confiscated and abandoned pro- 
perty, he had a special relation with the refugees 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 259 

from the South ; and after the taking of Port Royal, 
on the coast of North Carolina, in November, 1861, 
he was allowed to direct the first experiment in 
organizing and civilizing the former slaves. In 
January, 1862, he sent down his friend, Edward 
L. Pierce of Boston, an old-time abolitionist, who 
had already been at Port Royal and hence knew 
something of the conditions there. When Pierce, 
at Chase's request, waited upon Lincoln to discuss 
with him what might be done for the freedmen, 
the President broke in upon him impatiently with 
the inquiry, " What 's all this itching to get niggers 
into our lines ? " and he reluctantly authorized the 
Secretary of the Treasury to give to Pierce such 
instructions as might be necessary. In these in- 
structions Chase expressed his judgment that " the 
persons who have thus been abandoned by their 
masters, and who are received into the service of 
the country, can never, without great inhumanity 
on the part of the government, be reduced again to 
slavery." In his mind, therefore, military emanci- 
pation had begun, and the problem of caring for 
the former slaves must be assumed by the govern- 
ment. He took a great interest in the gathering 
and training of the refugees, and several times 
visited the station in person. 

In the spring of 1862 the direction of the work 
was transferred to the War Department, but 
Chase, through his special control of the collection 
of cotton, kept in close touch with the missionary 
enterprise. General Hunter was put in command 



260 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

of the troops, but General Saxton was by Chase's 
personal request appointed military governor of 
South Carolina, and supervised the fugitives who 
occupied most of the little district within the 
Federal lines. The sea islands were again brought 
under cultivation; plantations were started, and 
lands in small plots were assigned to individual 
negroes. Schools were established by benevolent 
societies in the North, and, in spite of many dis- 
couragements, the experiment of making former 
slaves self-supporting was on the whole successful. 
In this work Chase felt that he had had neither sup- 
port nor sympathy from the President ; but when 
negro troops began to be organized, the settlement 
at Port Royal became important as a recruiting sta- 
tion, and at the end of the war a prosperous com- 
munity appeared to have been founded. Then 
questions were raised as to the title to the lands 
distributed to the f reedmen ; and in time most of 
them were dispossessed of the little holdings for 
which they had worked so hard, and the experi- 
ment came to an unhappy end. The Port Royal 
principle of special supervision and protection by 
the government was, however, continued to the end 
of reconstruction times. 

Neither fugitives nor refugees could much affect 
the other great problem of slavery, — the status 
of the slaves in the seceded States. President 
Lincoln, himself a native of Kentucky, had always 
had a strong sense of the practical difficulties 
and dangers of emancipation in regions where the 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 261 

negroes were numerous ; hence from 1861 to 1864 
he continued to press his influence to the farthest 
point possible in favor of compensated emancipa- 
tion, at least in the border States. Although 
Chase had looked with some favor on this plan 
in 1861, he finally set himself distinctly against 
Mr. Lincoln's corollary scheme for colonization 
of the freed negroes in the West Indies or in 
Central America. Chase felt that the Port Royal 
experiment had been neglected because "the col- 
onization delusion and negrophobia dread are too 
potent yet." Upon this point his view was clearer 
than that of the President; for colonization in- 
volved depriving the South of its laborers and the 
North of needed soldiers, and Chase was quicker 
than Lincoln to reach the point where he was 
willing to risk defection of the border States and 
political disturbance in the North, by setting free 
all the slaves in the Confederacy. 

Before the war had been going on many months 
the usefulness of the negroes as laborers on the 
fortifications began to be seen, and a few early 
voices were heard urging their enrollment as 
troops. Probably one of the earliest of these sug- 
gestions was made in May, 1861, by Elizur Wright. 
" At its foundation the war is all about the black 
man. Between magnanimity and contempt, we 
Northerners may be willing to fight it out for 
him, and entirely without his aid. But events are 
not ruled by men, and before the war is through 
the black man is pretty likely to be fighting for 



262 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

himself on one side or the other." Notwithstand- 
ing the fundamental objection to using slaves as 
soldiers, they were gathered in large quantities 
by the Southern authorities for work on fortifica- 
tions, and free negroes were in a few cases ac- 
tually enlisted and disciplined in the rebel army. 
At the capture of New Orleans a regiment of such 
negro troops was found there. 

Serious political objections stood in the way of 
negro enlistments either in Northern States or in 
conquered territory : white troops objected to ser- 
vice alongside negro soldiers ; and it was feared by 
many and hoped by a few that the effect of enlist- 
ment would be to stir up slave insurrections in 
the South. On May 9, 1862, General Hunter at 
Hilton Head raised the issue by proclaiming that 
" slavery and martial law in a free country are 
altogether incompatible. The persons in these 
three States, — Georgia, Florida, and South Caro- 
lina, — wherever held as slaves, are therefore de- 
clared forever free ; " at the same time he began 
upon his own responsibility to organize colored 
troops. With this action, which was as insubor- 
dinate as the similar proclamation of Fremont the 
year before, Chase sympathized, and he exerted 
his influence, though without avail, against its 
revocation by the President. " I have never been 
so sorely tried," he wrote to Horace Greeley, " in 
all that I have seen in the shape of irregularities, 
assumptions beyond the law, extravagances, defer- 
ence to generals and reactionists which I cannot 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 263 

approve, ... as by the nullifying of Hunter's pro- 
clamation." From this time on Chase remained a 
strong advocate of arming the negroes, and of mak- 
ing them eventually full citizens. Congress soon 
came to the point of authorizing the enlistment 
of negroes, by the act of July 17, 1862, which 
empowered the President " to employ as many 
persons of African descent as he may deem neces- 
sary and proper for the suppression of the rebel- 
lion, and for these purposes he may organize and 
use them in such manner as he may judge best 
for the public welfare." A few weeks later Secre- 
tary Stanton authorized the enlistment of troops 
at Port Royal, and in the Emancipation Proclama- 
tion of January 1, 1863, the President formally 
promised to receive negroes into the military ser- 
vice of the United States. 

Though Chase had no strong influence in any 
of the legislative or executive measures relative 
to slavery, he was always the mainspring of anti- 
slavery influence within the councils of the Presi- 
dent ; to him the abolitionists throughout the coun- 
try appealed for such action by the President as 
should forever stamp the institution of slavery 
with the crushing disapproval of the people in 
arms. Every week brought suggestions not only 
that the government had a duty in protecting fugi- 
tives and in punishing disloyal masters by freeing 
their slaves, but also that the great opportunity 
had come for a declaration that the war was a war 
upon slavery ; that, as Chase told Motley in June, 



264 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

1861, if the North was otherwise unable to put 
down the rebellion, " we shall then draw that sword 
which we prefer at present to leave in the sheath, 
and we shall proclaim the total abolition of slavery 
on the American continent. We do not wish this, 
we deplore it because of the ruin, confiscation of 
property, and of the servile insurrections, too hor- 
rible to contemplate, which would follow." 

That the negroes would rise if there was a good 
opportunity seems to have been accepted as an 
axiom on both sides; but the South understood 
the character of the negro better than did the 
North, and confidently denied its own axiom, with- 
drawing its able-bodied white men from the plan- 
tations, for military service. In the whole history 
of the Civil War, there is no case of a rising of 
slaves, though, till the first proclamation of eman- 
cipation was actually issued, Lincoln shrank from 
what seemed a desperate and dangerous appeal 
to their passions. Chase never faltered, but used 
all the influence that he possessed upon the Pre- 
sident and his fellow members of the cabinet to 
secure the desired proclamation ; and he so far 
realized the importance of the issue that he made 
in his diary from day to day those careful entries 
of the discussions in the cabinet which are the most 
definite source of our information about the mo- 
tives of Lincoln and his advisers at this crisis. 

In July, 1862, the political situation was threat- 
ening for the Republican party. The country was 
alarmed by disasters in the field, by new taxation, 






SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 265 

and by heavy loans, and it saw no likelihood of 
concentrated military energy. Chase himself was 
out of patience, and thought seriously of seeking 
a senatorship. In this gloomy period Chase earn- 
estly supported and even outran Lincoln's purpose 
to take a definite step which would be unmistak- 
able to the country and to foreign nations. His 
record of the discussion in the cabinet runs as 
follows : — 

July 21, " I went at the appointed hour, and 
found that the President had been profoundly con- 
cerned at the present aspect of affairs, and had 
determined to take some definite steps in respect to 
military action and slavery." To such a step most 
of the members of the cabinet were favorably in- 
clined. August 3, " I expressed my conviction 
. . . that the time for the suppression of the re- 
bellion without interference with slavery had long 
passed. . . . Mr. Seward expressed himself as in 
favor of any measures likely to accomplish the 
results I contemplated, which could be carried into 
effect without Proclamations ; and the President 
said he was pretty well cured of objections to any 
measure except want of adaptedness to put down 
the rebellion ; but did not seem satisfied that the 
time had come for the adoption of such a plan as I 
proposed." 

In September Chase was discouraged, and says : 
" I have urged my ideas on the President and my 
associates, till I begin to feel that they are irk- 
some to the first, and to one or two, at least, of the 



266 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

second." September 21, hearing that the Presi- 
dent was busy, he conjectures, " Possibly engaged 
on Proclamation." September 22 another cabinet 
meeting was held, the result of which was the pro- 
clamation of 1862. Of this important meeting we 
have a full and animated account in Chase's diary 
and memoranda : — 

" To Department about nine. State Depart- 
ment messenger came, with notice to Heads of 
Departments to meet at 12. Received sundry 
callers. Went to White House. 

" All the members of the Cabinet were in attend- 
ance. There was some general talk ; and the Pre- 
sident mentioned that Artemas Ward had sent 
him his book. Proposed to read a chapter which 
he thought very funny. Read it, and seemed to 
enjoy it very much — the Heads also (except Stan- 
ton) of course. The chapter was 'High handed 
Outrage at Utica.' 

" The President then took a graver tone and 
said : — 

" \ Gentlemen : I have, as you are aware, thought 
a great deal about the relation of this war to 
Slavery ; and you all remember that, several weeks 
ago, I read to you an Order I had prepared on this 
subject, which, on account of objections made by 
some of you, was not issued. Ever since then, my 
mind has been much occupied with this subject, 
and I have thought all along that the time for act- 
ing on it might very probably come. I think the 
time has come now. I wish it was a better time. 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 267 

I wish that we were in a better condition. The 
action of the army against the rebels has not been 
quite what I should have best liked. But they 
have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsyl- 
vania is no longer in danger of invasion. When 
the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as 
soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to 
issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I 
thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to 
any one ; but I made the promise to myself, and 
(hesitating a little) to my Maker. The rebel army 
is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that 
promise. I have got you together to hear what I 
have written down. I do not wish your advice 
about the main matter — for that I have deter- 
mined for myself. This I say without intending 
anything but respect for any one of you. But I 
already know the views of each on this question. 
They have been heretofore expressed, and I have 
considered them as thoroughly and carefully as I 
can. What I have written is that which my re- 
flections have determined me to say. If there is 
anything in the expressions I use, or in any other 
minor matter, which any one of you thinks had best 
be changed, I shall be glad to receive the sugges- 
tions. One other observation I will make. I know 
very well that many others might, in this matter, as 
in others, do better than I can ; and if I were sat- 
isfied that the public confidence was more fully pos- 
sessed by any one of them than by me, and knew 
of any Constitutional way in which he could be 



268 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly 
yield it to him. But though I believe that I have 
not so much of the confidence of the people as I had 
some time since, I do not know that, all things con- 
sidered, any other person has more ; and, however 
this may be, there is no way in which I can have 
any other man put where I am. I am here. I 
must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility 
of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.' 

"The President then proceeded to read his 
Emancipation Proclamation, making remarks on 
the several parts as he went on, and showing that 
he had fully considered the whole subject, in all the 
lights under which it had been presented to him. 

" After he had closed, Gov. Seward said : ' The 
general question having been decided, nothing can 
be said further about that. Would it not, however, 
make the Proclamation more clear and decided, to 
leave out all reference to the act being sustained 
during the incumbency of the present President ; 
and not merely say that the government " recog- 
nizes," but that it will maintain, the freedom it 
proclaims ? ' 

" I followed, saying : * What you have said, 
Mr. President, fully satisfies me that you have 
given to every proposition which has been made, a 
kind and candid consideration. And you have 
now expressed the conclusion to which you have 
arrived, clearly and distinctly. This it was your 
right, and under your oath of office your duty, to 
do. The Proclamation does not, indeed, mark out 






SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 269 

exactly the course I should myself prefer. But I 
am ready to take it just as it is written, and to 
stand by it with all my heart. I think, however, 
the suggestions of Gov. Seward very judicious, and 
shall be glad to have them adopted/ 

" The President then asked us severally our 
opinions as to the modifications proposed, saying 
that he did not care much about the phrases he 
had used. Every one favored the modification 
and it was adopted. Gov. Seward then proposed 
that in the passage relating to colonization, some 
language should be introduced to show that the 
colonization proposed was to be only with the con- 
sent of the colonists, and the consent of the States 
in which colonies might be attempted. This, too, 
was agreed to ; and no other modification was pro- 
posed. Mr. Blair then said that the question 
having been decided, he would make no objection 
to issuing the Proclamation ; but he would ask to 
have his paper, presented some days since, against 
the policy, filed with the Proclamation. The Pre- 
sident consented to this readily. And then Mr. 
Blair went on to say that he was afraid of the in- 
fluence of the Proclamation on the Border States 
and on the Army, and stated at some length the 
grounds of his apprehensions. He disclaimed most 
expressly, however, all objection to Emancipation 
per se, saying he had always been personally in 
favor of it — always ready for immediate Emanci- 
pation in the midst of Slave States, rather than 
submit to the perpetuation of the system." 



\ 



270 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

The proclamation was preliminary, but its effect 
was immediate : it caused parties and individuals 
to declare themselves. Nevertheless in the October 
and November elections for the next House no 
Republican majority could be secured out of the 
free States : but a silent and drastic process was 
applied by the military in the loyal border States, 
which caused them to furnish enough Republican 
members to make up the majority without which 
the war must fail. Upon the South and the slaves, 
the proclamation had no immediate effect; con- 
trary to Chase's judgment, it excepted the only 
territory where it could at once be applied, — those 
portions of the seceded States then occupied by 
Northern forces. 

At the cabinet meeting of December 31, 1862, 
the President called for suggestions on a final pro- 
clamation, and Chase proposed two alternatives : to 
make the proclamation apply to all parts of the 
seceded States except to West Virginia, and to 
omit any phrases which might be construed to in- 
cite servile insurrections. Neither of these sugges- 
tions found favor with the President, but he did 
adopt almost verbatim the dignified final paragraph 
written by the Secretary of the Treasury : " And 
upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of 
justice, warrantable by the Constitution, upon mili- 
tary necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment 
of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty 
God." With that invocation it went to the world 
on the first day of 1863. 



SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 271 

Whether the proclamation of emancipation had 
legal effect as a constitutional exercise of the war 
power, or whether it was only a declaration of polit- 
cal policy, to be finally carried out by the action of 
the Southern States and the Thirteenth Amend- 
ment, was a question which gave little concern to 
anti-slavery men during 1863 and 1864. The 
purpose of the administration was thenceforward 
undoubted, and the whole controversy entered upon 
a new stage, in which the principal issues were 
the emancipation acts of Maryland and Missouri, 
the political status of the emancipated negroes, and 
the use of negro troops. 

In the movements for constitutional amend- 
ments against slavery in the border States, Chase 
had great interest and little influence. Though 
opposed by the powerful influence of the Blairs, he 
continued a most efficient friend of the Southern 
negroes, and he used his opportunities as Secretary 
of the Treasury in special charge of border traffic, 
to support schemes for reconstruction intended to 
protect the freedmen. His interposition was asked 
in cases in which negroes floating about the border 
States were taken up and sold for their jail fees ; in 
February, 1863, he assumed the right to supervise 
contracts between whites and negro laborers within 
the Union lines ; and he sought the creation of a 
proposed Bureau of Emancipation, which eventu- 
ally developed into the Freedmen's Bureau. 

Serious questions arose out of the enlistment of 
black troops, which proceeded rapidly during 1863. 



272 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Through Denison and other federal officeholders 
and correspondents Chase did his utmost to stimu- 
late the enlistment of negroes. General Butler to 
some degree sympathized with this purpose, and 
enrolled several thousand negroes; but his suc- 
cessor, Banks, held back, notwithstanding Chase's 
efforts to encourage him. In March, 1863, Jack- 
sonville was taken and held by Northern troops, 
and Chase urged that it be made a centre of re- 
cruiting. His purpose in both States was not only 
to recruit needed troops but to draw negroes out of 
the Southern lines, and in the persons of the negro 
soldiers to furnish object lessons of the necessity 
of supplementing emancipation by sweeping away 
all the legal distinctions which hedged the negro 
about. 

Plainly, Chase's system must in the end come to 
an insistence on negro suffrage. It took a long 
time for him clearly to see that this was the logical 
result, but in December, 1863, he urged his friends 
in New Orleans to recognize the principle of " re- 
organization on the free labor and free suffrage 
basis." " How would it do," he asked of Horace 
Greeley, " to advocate something like this : that 
the new constitution [of Louisiana] contain a suf- 
frage article ; . . . that all citizens not imprisoned 
for crime in the country, who desire to exercise 
the right of suffrage, being twenty-one years of 
age, present themselves for examination to these 
commissioners, and on being found able to read 
and write, and possessed of a competent knowledge 









SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR 273 

of the Constitution of the State and the United 
States, receive certificates, describing each suffi- 
ciently so as to identify him, in virtue of which 
the citizen receiving it shall be entitled to receive 
the right of suffrage? Would it not be very 
honorable for Louisiana and Florida to lead the 
way in this country to an electoral community with 
no test except virtue and intelligence ? " 

So long as Lincoln lived, little progress was 
made in this direction, and a year later Chase 
wrote : " I fear our good President is so anxious 
for the restoration of the Union that he will not 
care sufficiently about the basis of representation. 
In my judgment there is none sound except abso- 
lute justice for all, and ample security of justice 
in law and suffrage.'' The progress of public sen- 
timent on this subject is a part of the story of 
reconstruction. 



CHAPTER XI 

NATIONAL BANKS AND THE GOLD QUESTION 

In his first formal report to Congress, Chase 
foreshadowed that part of his financial system 
which was most original, most permanent, and per- 
haps most serviceable to the country, — the na- 
tional bank scheme. From the beginning of the 
government, the States had chartered banks of 
issue upon such terms and with such security as 
seemed good to the legislatures. The United 
States Bank of 1791 had been a competitor with 
these state institutions ; and the second United 
States Bank (1816 to 1836) was chartered with 
the express purpose of furnishing a safe note cir- 
culation, which, by competition, should compel 
state banks to keep their currency on a specie 
basis. In 1861 the number of such banks was 
1600, with a capital of 1430,000,000 and a cir- 
culation of over $200,000,000, of which nearly 
$150,000,000 was in Northern States. 

Some of the more conservative New England 
and Middle States required a deposit of securi- 
ties, in order to redeem the circulating notes in 
case of the failure of the banks, and Louisiana 
and Kentucky had two of the securest systems 






NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 275 

in the Union. The best Western banks had re- 
demption agencies in Eastern cities ; and several 
of the Western States had each chartered a bank 
as a state institution, for which the ultimate se- 
curity was the credit of the commonwealth. Mul- 
titudes of other banks had no separate or adequate 
security for their circulating notes ; while hundreds 
of kinds of bills were in circulation, and new 
counterfeits appeared every day. The result was 
that in 1861 more than five thousand sorts of al- 
tered, raised, or spurious notes were afloat, and 
such was the suspicion of an unfamiliar bill that 
cases have been known where the owner of a 
perfectly good fifty-dollar note, exchangeable for 
specie on demand, has traveled for days before 
he could find any one who would so much as 
change it. 

The experience of the eight months of 1861, 
when great difficulty was found in placing loans 
through even the best of these banks, convinced 
Chase that they were not to be depended upon to 
stand as the permanent intermediary between the 
government and the people ; and we have already 
seen that the legal-tender controversy was, in his 
judgment, precipitated by the existence of the 
bank currency. From session of Congress to ses- 
sion, and from year to year, Chase insisted upon 
a new bank system, till in 1865 he saw his project 
carried out in all the details which he thought 
essential, and the system still remains a monu- 
ment to its founder. 



276 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Just when or why Chase first resolved to break 
up the state bank currency is uncertain. In his 
report of July 4, 1861, appears an innocent recom- 
mendation of taxes " on distilled liquors, on bank 
notes, on carriages, and similar descriptions of 
property ; " but in a letter a few months later he 
explains the recommendation as intended to break 
down the competition of the poorer currency with 
government notes, then redeemable in gold. He 
also fearlessly asserted "the duty of the general 
government to furnish a national currency. . . . 
Its neglect of this duty has cost the people as 
much as this war will cost them." In his re- 
port of December, 1861, Chase laid down his 
favorite principle, that a paper circulation was a 
loan without interest made by the people, and that 
the government was fairly entitled to the profitable 
privilege. He followed this up by a clear state- 
ment, from which he never wavered, "that Con- 
gress under its constitutional powers to lay taxes, 
to regulate commerce, and to regulate the issue 
of coin possesses ample authority to control the 
credit circulation." The characteristic features of 
the system which Chase outlined, and for which he 
presented the draft of a bill, were three : the issue 
of demand bank notes redeemable in coin ; the 
requirement that United States bonds should be 
the only non-metallic basis for circulation ; and the 
preparation and issue of all notes under the direc- 
tion of the government. He thus intended to 
secure simultaneously the three advantages of a 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 277 

safe currency, of loans to the government, and of 
a simple and uniform system of notes, under the 
guaranty of the nation. 

It was one thing to propose so sweeping a re- 
form, and to point out the ease with which the 
change might be brought about through a simple 
transformation of the state bank currency into a 
currency founded on national authority; it was 
quite another to meet the conservatism of Con- 
gress ; and it was still more difficult to overcome 
the opposition of the banks themselves to the 
transformation thus suggested. Though Hooper 
of Massachusetts, one of the few approvers of the 
proposition, was a member of the Committee of 
Ways and Means, Thaddeus Stevens, as chairman, 
reported against the project early in 1862 ; and 
Chase thus lost the opportunity to enter on what 
in private conversation he declared to be "the 
only way by which we can raise the means to carry 
on the war and save the country." 

During 1862 the legal-tender notes were freely 
poured out, till by October 1 they reached $200,- 
000,000. The expectation that they would be con- 
verted in large quantities into interest - bearing 
loans was not realized. On the other hand, the 
state bank circulation also increased, and the state 
banks grew more determined in their opposition to 
the renewal, at the next session of Congress, of the 
effort to charter national banks. Again, in his 
second annual report, December, 1862, the secre- 
tary feelingly pointed out that government legal 



278 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

tender notes were being used instead of specie to 
form bank reserves, and were thus withdrawn from 
circulation and replaced by state bank notes ; and 
he proposed in round terms that " the circulation 
furnished by the government be issued by banking 
associations, organized under a general act of Con- 
gress.' ' 

Several factors combined to give the whole pro- 
ject greater strength than in the previous year. 
The delay of Congress had the excellent effect of 
showing that the weaker banks would not volun- 
tarily give up the privileges of their state charters 
and accept a currency under national auspices; 
but that the cohort was broken by the decision 
of some of the strongest banks to take federal 
charters as well as federal circulation. Men like 
President Walley of the Revere Bank of Boston 
saw no objection to creating national banks in the 
great financial centres ; and some of the savings 
banks discovered the preference of their depositors 
for government notes, and were plagued by the 
miscellaneous state bank notes which they had to 
receive from the regular banks of issue. Mean- 
while Chase's renewed effort to get a tax on state 
bank notes gave some alarm to the regular banks ; 
and his personal friends went to various state 
legislatures urging them to indorse his plan. At 
length, on January 17, 1863, Chase secured from 
Lincoln a special message asking Congress to pass 
a national bank act ; and by the middle of Febru- 
ary, amateur lobbyists were asking Chase's favor 






NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 279 

on the ground that they were influencing votes for 
his scheme. Finally, on February 25, 1863, the 
National Bank Act was passed by the narrow 
votes of 23 to 21 in the Senate, and 78 to 64 in 
the House. 

The statute, however, did not go to the point 
which Chase felt to be absolutely essential. It 
authorized the chartering of associations which 
should deposit with the Treasury of the United 
States bonds of the United States to the amount of 
not less than one half of their capital ; it permitted 
such banks to receive notes to the amount of ninety 
per cent of the par value of the bonds thus depos- 
ited, the total amount of notes to be limited to 
$300,000,000; and it exempted the new banks 
from taxation, a privilege which tended to make 
them unpopular in the States. But the act also 
authorized the issuance of similar notes to the 
amount of eighty per cent of the face value of 
United States bonds deposited by state corpora- 
tions. The bill was therefore little more than a 
permission to new institutions to enter into compe- 
tition with state banks, or to existing state banks 
to reorganize under a national charter. 

A few months' experience showed how little the 
privileges were valued; and the old state bank 
notes continued to increase. In vain did Chase's 
friends, political and financial, make a personal 
effort to found new banks ; in vain did Jay Cooke 
give a dinner to all the editors in New York, in the 
hope to swing them into line. The bankers thought 



280 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the old system more profitable ; and men like 
Chase's friend George Opdyke, who tried to organ- 
ize national banks, found themselves hampered and 
chilled by political opposition. 

After more than two years of effort Chase's 
national bank scheme had actually done little for 
the government and less for the public. By De- 
cember, 1863, thirty-four of the new banks had 
been formed ; but their whole capital was only 
116,000,000 and their notes actually issued were 
not much above 13,000,000, while $450,000,000 
of legal tender had been authorized and $447,000,- 
000 had been issued. In his third annual report, 
in 1863, Chase indefinitely suggested " proper 
measures " to induce the conversion of the state 
banks into national banks, though he still ex- 
pected that large numbers of the banks would 
voluntarily accept the change. A few months 
more of experience convinced him of the con- 
trary, and early in 1864 he proposed a prohibitory 
taxation of state banks, on the ground that the 
effect of the legal tender act had been to relieve 
them from their charter obligation to redeem their 
notes in specie, and that therefore they had pro- 
vided themselves with reserves of legal tenders, 
with the result that the irredeemable notes of the 
United States were made the basis of a second 
issue of paper money of greater amount than the 
paper reserve of the banks. 

In March, 1864, Chase brought forward an 
\ amendatory national bank bill, ill-naturedly char- 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 281 

acterized by an opponent as made up of a special 
clause for the benefit of the Bank of Commerce in 
New York city, an admission that the original bill 
had failed, and an appeal to adopt the principles of 
the first bill. Even now the secretary had not 
thought it prudent to introduce a prohibitory clause 
against the state institutions, contenting himself 
with a bill which would make easier the transition 
from state to national charters ; but this moderate 
measure, though it much improved the original 
bank act, failed mainly on the question of the ex- 
emption of the national banks from all state taxes ; 
and on April 6, with the assent of its friends, it 
was laid on the table. Chase exerted himself de- 
sperately in behalf of his favorite measure. He 
urged Horace Greeley to " say in the ' Tribune * 
that it is as wrong in principle to issue and cir- 
culate . . . paper money without the imprint and 
sanction of the nation as it is to issue and cir- 
culate a piece of metallic money." A few days 
later he addressed a remonstrance to Thaddeus 
Stevens, urging that the " emission of notes of cir- 
culation by private, municipal, or state authority is 
as indefensible as the emission of coin by the same 
authority." To Greeley he had also thrown out 
suggestions that the state banks must be taxed " as 
much as they can bear," and he appealed also to 
the President to stand by the prohibition of bank 
issues. 

Under these influences, Chase's bill was revived 
and passed, June 3, 1864, including a special clause 



282 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

permitting the transfer of the anomalous Bank of 
Commerce of New York, with its $10,000,000 
of capital, into a national bank ; and the taxation 
question was stilled by allowing taxes on the shares 
of a national bank only in the State where it was 
located, at the same rates as for other similar insti- 
tutions ; while a tax of about one per cent was also 
laid on the national banks by the national treasury. 
The new system stimulated conversions, and in 
December, 1864, there were nearly six hundred 
national banks, with a circulation of $65,000,000. 

The final step was taken long after Chase's resig- 
nation, by the passing of the act of March 3, 1865, 
which embodied the provision which had been in 
Chase's mind more than four years earlier, — a tax 
of ten per cent on all state bank notes. Although 
many of the state institutions never accepted gov- 
ernment charters, they were obliged to give up their 
issues ; and when the tax took effect, the whole issue 
of bank paper notes was transferred to 1650 national 
banks, having a circulation of over 1400,000,000. 

The plan of a national bank system is indubita- 
bly Chase's. His was the first definite conception 
of a circulation under national authority, backed up 
by a prohibitory, or at least a discriminating, tax 
on other issues ; and in 1862 he added the neces- 
sary feature that all the banks of issue should owe 
their charter to the United States and be subject 
to national supervision. In Chase's mind a great 
advantage of the scheme was the demand thus cre- 
ated for government bonds, and the consequent 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 283 

relief of the legal tender notes ; and it was not his 
fault that during his administration little progress 
was made in the actual accepting of United States 
securities as a basis for notes. A second consider- 
ation which Chase had always in mind was the 
national need of a currency at once uniform and 
safe. He approved of all three of the measures 
which were finally passed into law ; and much of 
the present organization of the national banks is 
due to his invention. He had many disappoint- 
ments in dealing with Congress ; but his is the 
triumph of conceiving a working national bank 
system, of showing its possibilities, and of putting 
it into force. 

Though a central idea of the national bank sys- 
tem was that the notes should always be redeem- 
able in specie, Chase had the mortification to see 
the circulating notes of the government gradually 
sink. In April, 1862, the depreciation was less 
than two per cent; but after the failure of the 
Peninsular campaign greenbacks fell to about 
eighty-seven cents on the dollar, and by December, 
1862, to about seventy-five cents. 

This depreciation was a sore point with Chase, 
and in his reports he attempted, with but poor 
success, to show, first that it was less than it ap- 
peared to be, and second, that it was not due to 
excess of government paper. " Gold," he said, 
"had become an article of merchandise, subject 
to the ordinary fluctuations of supply and demand 
and to the extraordinary fluctuations of mere spec- 



284 SALMON POETLAND CHASE 

ulation." In December, 1862, the aggregate circu- 
lation of paper, national and state, was about $400,- 
000,000, which he considered hardly more than 
was necessary, considering the active condition of 
business ; any excess of currency he attributed to 
the state banks. During 1863, however, while the 
bank issues were about stationary, the government 
increased its legal tenders and fractional notes by 
nearly 1300,000,000. Once more the secretary 
could not believe that "the increase in price is 
attributable wholly or in very large measure to this 
circulation," and he still asserted that not his notes 
but those of the banks were at fault. 

Though Chase could argue that paper money did 
not fall, he could not deny that " gold was rising," 
and various expedients were suggested for stop- 
ping the process. In November, 1862, a plan was 
sent him for issuing gold and silver notes, to be 
always redeemable in specie, and available for the 
payment of customs and other specie obligations. 
But some bankers and public men kept calling 
for issues of government paper, even to the extent 
of replacing all the interest-bearing bonds ; and in 
February, 1863, owing to some temporary flurry, 
a small premium was offered for state bank notes 
over United States notes, and some creditors of the 
government even declined to receive those trea- 
sury notes which were not specifically legal tender. 
The only part of the country where gold contin- 
ued to circulate was the Pacific coast, and through 
his special agent in San Francisco Chase made 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 285 

several unsuccessful efforts to introduce the legal 
tenders there and thus to drive out the gold. Gold 
stood January 31, 1863, at 160, and during the 
year various devices were proposed for checking the 
depreciation of paper. One was Colfax's scheme, — 
tried and found wanting in the Revolution, — that 
of fixing the legal tender notes at a depreciation of 
one third their face, with the hope thus to prevent 
their sinking lower. Wilder schemes were sug- 
gested, such as the sending out of treasury agents 
to corner all floating gold and force down its price 
by drawing on the reserve of the Treasury ; or to 
tax the business of gold speculation. 

In March, 1862, the first legislation on this sub- 
ject was obtained in the form of a statute author- 
izing the government to purchase gold with bonds 
or notes; and in March, 1863, the secretary re- 
ceived authority to pay gold interest in advance ; 
and a tax was laid on all contracts for the purchase 
of coin or bullion. In the spring of 1864 the pub- 
lic uneasiness had reached such a point that the 
secretary attempted first one and then another 
measure of repression. His first idea was the sell- 
ing of treasury gold, in order to " bear " the gold 
market ; and in the middle of April, he himself went 
to New York, where, by the sale of $11,000,000, 
he did succeed for a few days in running the pre- 
mium down from 189 to 165, though he soon saw 
that he could not achieve a permanent effect. Only 
one means seemed left : through the President and 
through Congress, he pushed again his favorite 



286 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

scheme for prohibiting state bank notes, a plan 
which might have had some effect, but found no 
favor; at the same time he urged a statute for 
punishing criminally the business of dealing in gold 
futures. 

The " Gold Bill," long delayed in the House, 
did not become law until June 17. It provided 
penalties for effecting contracts in gold coin or 
bullion or foreign exchange for future delivery, 
and also declared all such contracts absolutely void. 
The result was that in ten days, from June 20 to 
June 30, gold rose from about 200 to 250. It was 
useless for Chase to write to his financial supporters 
in New York that " there is not the slightest reason 
for any rise in the price of gold, either in the finan- 
cial or military situation ; " and it was equally fu- 
tile to draft a new bill for the sale of gold and 
silver mining lands, as a means of restoring confi- 
dence in the ultimate payment of the notes. The 
great bankers of New York came to Congress to 
demand the repeal of the act, on the ground that 
it only made it easier for gold speculators to mono- 
polize their commodity ; and they secured a hasty 
repeal of the Gold Bill on July 2, 1864. The 
almost simultaneous resignation of Chase further 
excited the gold speculators, causing gold a few 
days later to reach its highest figure of about 285 ; 
in August and September it began to decline, with 
irregularity. In February, 1865, it fell to 200; 
and in March to 150. 

It has often been asserted that the real cause of 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 287 

Chase's withdrawal from the Treasury was the 
failure of this measure and the revealed inability 
of the secretary to keep up the public credit ; but 
there is nothing in the private papers of either 
Chase or Lincoln to show that the President felt 
his secretary responsible for the fall of the legal 
tenders or that Chase had lost the confidence of the 
financiers of the country. The premium on gold 
was an index of the distress and uneasiness of the 
people at the long progress of the war; and the 
reason for the gradual recovery of the public credit, 
after Chase's withdrawal, was simply the conviction 
that the military commanders then at the head of 
the army would carry the war to a successful end. 
No doubt one reason why Chase offered his resig- 
nation was his conviction that he was rendering so 
great a service to the country that he could not be 
spared and must be conciliated. How far did the 
events of his secretaryship justify this confidence 
in Chase's financial abilities, held not only by him- 
self but by multitudes of his admirers throughout 
the country ? The question is not simply what he 
did, but what he did under the circumstances and 
conditions of the times. Chase took the Treasury 
when the country had for more than forty years 
known no sort of a national taxation except cus- 
toms duties, when state taxes were also very low, 
and when the private finance of the country was 
as yet little organized in powerful associations or 
syndicates. He suffered from the lack of ade- 
quate personal backing in Congress, through which 



288 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

lie might have more urgently presented his finan- 
cial schemes. He suffered also from the lack of 
previous acquaintance with the bankers and lend- 
ers of the country ; and he was most of all ham- 
pered by the inability of all the leading public 
men, including himself, to foresee how long and 
how desperate the Civil War must be. He was 
not fairly aroused until 1863, and by that time 
the Treasury was too deep in its legal tender 
notes to free itself, either through taxation, or 
through the better market for loans which resulted 
from the victories of Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and 
Chattanooga, and from the success of the blockade 
of the Southern ports. His loans were wisely and 
shrewdly managed, and would have been more 
successful had Congress carried out his full na- 
tional bank system in 1862 instead of 1865, and 
had he avoided the serious mistake of refusing to 
make long loans at par at high rates of interest. 
Here again the defective currency system came in 
to check his best laid plans, for he was justified in 
the hope to strengthen his legal tenders by making 
them convertible into bonds, and can hardly be 
held to account for failing to foresee that the bonds 
were weakened by the bringing of their price 
down to the level of the greenbacks. 

The legal tenders came upon him unexpectedly 
and like a flood. Here his fault, if there were 
one, lay in supposing that he could immediately 
stop the state bank issues and thus prevent infla- 
tion ; and in failing to see that Congress, and even 



NATIONAL BANKS AND GOLD QUESTION 289 

the secretary, would inevitably fall back upon the 
printing-press whenever there was a crisis in the 
Treasury. Having once yielded to the pressure 
of many of his financial advisers, as well as to 
the popular feeling reflected in Congress, Chase 
could never recover his ground, and later said that 
the only thing he regretted in his treasury experi- 
ence was his giving way on that point. As for the 
national banks, Chase, with all his energy, could 
succeed only in laying the foundations upon which 
his successors built ; but he laid them deeply and 
firmly. 

The errors in Chase's finance were, then, due 
partly to inexperience, partly to want of apprehen- 
sion of the tremendous task thrust upon him, and 
partly to the hurry and rush of a desperate time. 
His positive measures were on the whole success- 
ful, and it must never be forgotten that he had two 
qualities which were more valuable to the country 
and the Treasury than financial genius : he had 
indomitable persistence, and he had the honesty 
which needed not his own too frequent approval. 
However much he groaned over the difficulties of 
his place, he met those difficulties firmly day by 
day, and he did not deceive or cajole. Nor did 
he protect dishonest men : his immediate subordi- 
nates were trustworthy and efficient, and justified 
his confidence; indeed, the average character of 
the treasury official was higher than in any other 
department of the public service except perhaps 
the Navy. Chase deserves to be called a great Sec- 
retary of the Treasury. 



CHAPTER XH 

CHASE AND LINCOLN 

The relations of the Secretary of the Treasury 
with the President during the Civil War have been 
much discussed and much misunderstood. Though 
each at times found his patience sorely tried by 
the other, the two men had always a genuine re- 
spect and esteem for each other, and they were 
perhaps more nearly in accord in their judgment 
on political questions than were any others in the 
cabinet council. 

It was a misfortune that the two men had known 
each other but little before their association in the 
same administration. When Chase came to Wash- 
ington, he expected a more intimate friendship 
with the President than he ever gained ; in after 
years he felt that perhaps he had made a mistake in 
choosing a house more than a mile from the White 
House ; for Seward, he thought, lived so near by 
that he had an opportunity to know Lincoln in an 
informal good fellowship which was denied to him. 
But the real cause that kept Lincoln and Chase 
from coming close together lay much deeper than 
a separation by a few furlongs. While kindly, 
genial, and agreeable among his friends, Chase had 






CHASE AND LINCOLN 291 

the misfortune to lack a sense of humor; and a 
Puritan conception of the gravity and seriousness 
of his work kept him from really understanding 
the easier and less strenuous attitude of the born 
Kentuckian. Chase was also apt to feel that his 
good counsels were slighted or disregarded, and he 
was touchy about the conduct of his office ; while 
Lincoln was willing to go great lengths in order 
to preserve the peace and keep the machinery of 
government moving. 

In the duties of his office Chase experienced 
from Lincoln such consideration and such willing- 
ness to leave department matters to his secretary's 
judgment as fall to the lot of few cabinet officers. 
Lincoln was satisfied to throw the responsibility 
of the Treasury upon his secretary's shoulders, 
though he sometimes helped him out by a special 
message to Congress. In the great questions of 
the Civil War, the two men had the same high 
sense of their duty to preserve the country from 
dissolution and the people from injustice, but by 
their natural habits of thought they felt in very 
different proportions an interest in the main issues ; 
for instance, Lincoln had a much stronger sense 
of the political and military necessity of placating 
the border States than was possible to the Ohio 
anti-slavery man. On the question of slavery also 
the two men had different points of view, for 
Chase hoped and expected that slavery would 
receive its death-blow, while Lincoln a few days 
before his Emancipation Proclamation announced 



292 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

that lie was willing to save the Union without free- 
ing a slave. The hostility of the two men to the 
institution itself was very similar ; but in Chase's 
mind the war was a means to emancipation, in Lin- 
coln's mind emancipation was a means to success- 
ful war. In political matters also the two men 
never pulled together. Chase sought to build up 
the Republican party because he thought it the 
safeguard of freedom ; Lincoln hoped to get the 
support of the people in order that he might re- 
store the Union. To sum up the whole matter in 
a sentence, union and freedom were dear to both 
men, but to Chase freedom was the necessary foun- 
dation of union, and to Lincoln union was the 
prerequisite of freedom. 

Considering the free scope which Chase had in 
his own department, it must have been trying to 
the President that the Secretary of the Treasury 
should so often attempt to put pressure upon him 
in military matters. Chase reasoned that he was 
witness to a military expenditure which he could 
not control, and yet which he must meet, at the 
risk of his reputation as a financier, and even at 
the peril of the national credit. He found it pos- 
sible to concentrate the capital of the country be- 
hind him and to impress upon Congress the need 
of financial vigor, and hence he thought that simi- 
lar energy in other departments would bring the 
war to a speedy end. Maunsell Field, one of 
Chase's subordinates in the treasury, says that on 
one occasion Chase was so wrought up by the reports 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 293 

of scandalous waste in the quartermaster's depart- 
ment that he personally upbraided Stanton. From 
time to time his letters and his diary express wrath 
and grief over unnecessary expenditure, which 
seemed to produce no military advantage, in such 
terms as this entry in his diary for September, 
1862 : " Warrants to-day enormous, over $4,000,- 
000, and unpaid requisitions still accumulating — 
now over $40,000,000. Where wiU this end?" 
All the world now knows that Chase was right in 
feeling that the men and money were not so 
applied as to get the greatest result ; his error was 
in failing to realize the political difficulty of mana- 
ging so complex a machinery as the volunteer army. 
Another cause of friction with the President was 
a different conception of the functions of heads 
of departments. From time to time Chase com- 
plained in his private diary and in conversations 
and letters that there was no cabinet. On one 
occasion he "told Weed that we must have de- 
cided action and that he [Weed] could insure 
it ; was going to meeting of heads of departments, 
not to cabinet.' ' A few days later he wrote to 
Greeley : " It seems to me that in this government 
the President and his cabinet ought to be well 
advised of all matters vital to the military and 
civil administration ; but each one of us, to use a 
presidential expression, turns his own machine, 
with almost no comparison of views or consultation 
of any kind. It seems to me all wrong and I have 
tried very hard to have it otherwise — unavail- 



294 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ingly." About the same time he complained to 
Senator John Sherman of the lack of discussion on 
the campaign. " We have as little to do with it 
as if we were heads of factories, supplying shoes or 
clothing. No regular and systematic reports of 
what is done are made, I believe, even to the 
President; certainly none are made to the cabi- 
net." That there ought to have been some sort of 
clearing-house in which the several heads of de- 
partments might understand each other's purposes 
is undeniable, but Chase appears to have reached 
out farther : even when the cabinet was summoned 
to discuss great military crises he felt aggrieved 
if the President went on his way, disregarding the 
plentiful good advice of the Secretary of the Trea- 
sury. 

Occasionally Chase tried giving unasked coun- 
sel. In June, 1862, when McClellan was engaged 
in the Peninsula, Chase strongly urged the Presi- 
dent to direct a column of troops to Charlottes- 
ville, and was much pained that his judgment was 
not followed. A little later he was writing to 
General Pope and General Butler on the slavery 
question, and was trying to impress the President 
with the necessity of a campaign against Vicks- 
burg. In August, 1862, he joined Seward in an 
attempt to coerce the President into dismissing 
McClellan from command of the troops before 
Washington ; the two got Bates and Smith to join 
them in a protest, and secured Stanton's neutrality. 
Lincoln expressed his distress to "find himself 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 295 

differing on such a point from the Secretary of 
War and the Secretary of the Treasury ; that he 
would gladly resign his place, but he could not 
see who could do the work wanted so well as 
McClellan." 

Chase's military interest was not confined to the 
cabinet ; his active correspondence with army offi- 
cers in the field, and his exchange of views with 
them about the military policy of the President, 
have been brought out clearly by letters printed 
by Warden, Schuckers, and Hay and Nicolay; 
which might be enlarged from the files of his cor- 
respondence. Upon these letters, biographers of 
Lincoln have even founded an indictment against 
Chase, as a man trying to undermine his superiors 
and counseling disobedience to the President's 
orders. 

From December, 1861, to the final failure of the 
campaign of 1862, Chase did attempt to infuse 
vigor into the commanders by direct incentive. 
In December, 1861, he asked McClellan to confer 
with him, and the next day he sent a direct com- 
munication to the general asking him to protect 
the Baltimore and Ohio Eailroad. In 1862 he 
began a correspondence with Colonel James A. 
Garfield, with whom he maintained intimate rela- 
tions throughout the war. General Morgan asked 
him for regular troops ; General Shields wanted 
him to confer in his behalf with the President ; he 
was in direct and confidential correspondence with 
General Butler in New Orleans ; General Banks 



296 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

sent him a message saying that he should like to 
join forces with Chase, the two to be " head and 
arm ; " to General McDowell, in March, 1862, he 
sent an article from the " Cincinnati Commercial " 
criticising McClellan, who was then superior in 
rank to McDowell ; to Colonel Key he expressed 
his reasons for approving Lincoln's orders to 
McDowell before McClellan's campaign of 1862. 
When his confidence in McClellan at last broke 
down, he wrote again to McDowell, saying : " With 
50,000 men and you for a general I would under- 
take to go from Fortress Monroe to Richmond in 
two days." A note to Greeley on May 21, 1862, 
sums up his opinion in a few words : " McClellan 
is a dear luxury — fifty days — fifty miles — fifty 
millions of dollars — easy arithmetic, but not satis- 
factory. If one could have some faith in his com- 
petency in battle, should his army ever fight one, if 
not in his competency for movement, it would be a 
comfort." 

After the failure of the Peninsular campaign, 
Chase was very anxious to be rid of McClellan. 
Nevertheless when a few days later he called on 
General Halleck he " judged it prudent not to say 
much of the war." For McDowell and for Pope 
he had a special sympathy, and he did what he 
could to make their retiring easier. On Septem- 
ber 23, 1862, he called on Hooker, and gave 
that general to understand that he had favored 
his appointment immediately after the Peninsular 
campaign. As new officers came forward in 1862 






CHASE AND LINCOLN 297 

and 1863, Chase made it a point to get into re- 
lations with them. He congratulated Rousseau; 
he wrote to Rosecrans, regretting that his only 
connection with the general's fortune had been an 
effective influence in obtaining his brigadiership ; 
and urging him to seize East Tennessee. Just be- 
fore the battle of Gettysburg he wrote to the Presi- 
dent, urging that Hooker should not be relieved. 
He also wrote a personal letter to Grant, intimating 
that the treasury agents had done the general a 
service by favorable reports upon his campaigns. 
No one can blame a man, who had such opportuni- 
ties of seeing actual difficulties, for suggesting and 
remonstrating. The reprehensible thing in Chase's 
system was that he entered into relations with 
military men and gave them advice which did not 
come from the consent of the other members of 
the cabinet or from an understanding with the 
President. Hence he could never escape the sus- 
picion that he was trying to make friends who 
would be useful to him in politics. 

Secretary Chase did not mean to reverse, but 
rather to supplement, the direct orders of the Pres- 
ident and of the Secretary of War, — he meant to 
enforce energy and not to divide counsels. He 
had a natural breadth and definiteness of view, 
and his military instincts though untrained were 
good. Unfortunately, when things went wrong he 
could not refrain from expressing his disapproba- 
tion, even to the point of direct criticism on the 
President. For instance, on May 30, 1861, he 



298 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

protested against a proposition to call out more 
three-months men, complaining that in the cabinet 
meeting " the President did not give me a chance 
to express my views." He also advocated the 
seizure and fortification of Manassas two months 
before the battle of Bull Run ; but, said he, " I 
have not been able to make our friends in the 
administration see as I have seen; when, there- 
fore, I am overruled, I have quietly submitted." 

These discussions were of course within the cir- 
cle of the administration, but at various times 
Chase wrote letters to other persons — who doubt- 
less circulated them — in which he expressed his 
distrust of the President. " We have not accom- 
plished what we ought to have accomplished," he 
writes, September 8, 1862 : " we have put small 
forces where large forces were needed, and have 
failed to improve advantages and successes when 
obtained." September 12 he notes : " Expenses are 
enormous, increasing instead of diminishing; and 
the ill success in the field has so affected govern- 
ment stocks that it is impossible to obtain money 
except on temporary deposit. ... It is a bad state 
of things ; but neither the President, his council- 
ors, nor his commanding generals seem to care. 
They rush on from expense to expense, and from 
defeat to defeat, heedless of the abyss of bank- 
ruptcy and ruin which yawns before us. May God 
open the eyes of those who control us before it is 
too late ! " 

To John Sherman he wrote, September 20, 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 299 

1862 ; " It is painful, however, to hear complaints 
of remissness, delays, discords, dangers, and to 
feel that there must be ground for such complaints, 
and to know that one has no power to remedy the 
evils, and yet is thought to have." And on the 
same day to John Owen : " Oh ! that the Presi- 
dent and those who control military movements 
may see the necessity of following up vigorously 
and indefatigably the success now achieved." To 
an intimate friend he wrote, four days later, that 
if his advice had been taken the war would have 
been already finished. " What could I do beyond 
what I have done," he added, " except resign and 
come home ? " And a few weeks later he was sure 
that, if McClellan had conferred with him, the 
rebellion would have been ended before that time. 
To another correspondent he complains : " The 
President, from the purest motives, committed the 
management of the war almost exclusively to his 
political opponents ; it is sad to think of the delay 
and anxiety which have marked the past, but I am 
confident that it will not characterize the future." 

From these examples it is evident that Chase 
expostulated and sometimes wrangled with the 
President about military matters, and that he 
many times expressed his dissatisfaction to his 
friends. This is the greatest weakness in his polit- 
ical life, and must be contrasted with the Presi- 
dent's own forbearance and his care not to throw 
the responsibility of the national defense upon 
other people. The explanation is that Chase 



300 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

understood neither the President's difficulties nor 
the temperament of the people, nor the efficiency 
of Secretary Stanton, a man as vigorous and de- 
termined as Chase himself. What the country 
really needed was not simply commanders of great 
military genius, but commanders of experience in 
handling armies, and of reputation such as would 
gain the confidence of the country; and nothing 
could be more certain than that a military admin- 
istration such as Chase desired — a coalition of cab- 
inet officers with a few military men — would have 
been far less likely to discover and support such 
commanders than was the administration of a 
single person. 

Another cause of disagreement between Lincoln 
and Chase was the latter's uneasiness at the appli- 
cation of military government to regions where no 
war was going on. Chase disapproved of the mili- 
tary court-martial of Vallandigham in 1862, on 
which the Supreme Court later passed an unfavor- 
able judgment; "not," he said, " that I am averse 
to arrests for sufficient cause and in the proper time 
and place, . . . but I think the exercise of such 
power ought to be reserved for grave and clear 
occasions." In cabinet discussions of the habeas 
corpus, Chase stood out for the right of state 
courts to issue the writ in order to discharge per- 
sons wrongfully detained as enlisted men; but 
after consideration the secretary admitted that the 
President had the constitutional power to suspend 
the writ as to both state and federal judges, with- 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 301 

out authority of Congress, though he insisted that 
the authority of the President was based distinctly 
on the habeas corpus clause of the Constitution (to 
some degree defined by statutes) and not upon any 
general military power. With the military trials 
of civilians Chase had little sympathy ; and later 
as chief justice he had the opportunity for assert- 
ing the supremacy of the judiciary over military 
government outside the theatre of war. 

On the whole, Chase's interference in military 
matters did not lead to friction in the cabinet, both 
because he was disregarded and because he kept 
on good terms alike with the too facile Cameron 
and with the testy and violent Stanton. When 
Cameron was compelled to resign, Chase asked and 
secured from the President a letter of polite regret. 
Of Stanton Chase wrote, eight years later : " I do 
not know that we ever agreed fully either as to 
theory or practice in respect to the rights of colored 
citizens or as to the duties of the government and 
the nation to them, . . . though he came into the 
cabinet adopting practical principles more akin to 
mine, especially on the subject of enlisting colored 
men as soldiers." The two men respected each 
other's energy, and Chase rebuked his correspond- 
ents for holding Stanton responsible for failures 
in the field. 

With Seward, Chase's relations were peculiar. 
Coming in with a strong sense of rivalry, each man 
hoping and perhaps expecting to obtain the ascend- 
ency over the President, the two secretaries found 



302 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

it difficult to harmonize. They could cooperate in 
the appointment of Stanton, and during 1862 their 
relations were more cordial. Chase wrote to Sew- 
ard frankly and confidentially, asking that Came- 
ron be allowed to come home from Kussia, and to 
mutual friends he expressed his " wishes for har- 
mony." In September, 1862, a strong current 
began to set against Seward, because he was sup- 
posed to be resisting the radical views on the sla- 
very question ; Thurlow "Weed even came to Chase 
with stories of dissatisfaction in New York toward 
Seward. If this were a trap, Chase avoided it, but 
he seemed struck by Weed's suggestion that he 
and Seward " must agree on a definite line, espe- 
cially on the slavery question, which we must recom- 
mend to the President." Matters came to a head 
on December 17, 1862, when a caucus of the Ee- 
publican senators agreed, with one dissentient, that 
the President must " reconstruct his cabinet." 

In this crisis Chase and Seward came to an un- 
derstanding by which each sent in his resignation. 
Major Dwight Bannister, in reminiscences written 
many years later, records Chase's explanation to a 
congressman as follows : " He told the gentleman 
that he resigned from the cabinet much through 
disgust at Mr. Lincoln's weakening and consenting 
that, at the dictation and demand of the disaffected 
senators, he should be willing to let his chief friend 
in the cabinet be driven out. That six months 
after the whole country had lost all confidence in 
the ability or fitness of General McClellan, Mr. 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 303 

Seward almost solely and alone of the cabinet offi- 
cers had supported the President in still retaining 
McClellan in command of the Army of the Poto- 
mac ; and now, to let him be driven out simply be- 
cause he has faithfully stood by him in his policy 
seems to me almost pusillanimous. And, besides, 
Seward is the only distinctive and original anti-sla- 
very man besides myself in the cabinet ; and when 
he is allowed to go out, I stand as such almost soli- 
tary and alone. There is no cabinet; there are 
certain heads of departments, but no real cabinet. 
I tell you I am sick of it and I am glad to get out 
of it." 

Chase's three letters written to Lincoln on the 
three successive days of the crisis clearly show 
that he expected that more attention would thence- 
forward be paid to his own opinions, and those of 
his colleagues. In the first letter, December 20, he 
resigned without any suggestion of reasons. When 
the President at once replied to Seward and Chase 
that the public interest did not allow him to accept 
their resignations, Seward promptly and cheerfully 
resumed his office, but Chase still held out on the 
ground that, " being once honorably out of the Cab- 
inet, no important public interest now requires my 
return to it." On December 22 he sent a second 
letter to the President to the effect that he had 
been led " to the conclusion that I ought in this 
matter to conform my action to your judgment and 
wishes ; " but he could not forbear sending also a 
third letter prepared two days beforehand, setting 



304 SALMON POKTLAND CHASE 

forth that, " I could not, if I would, conceal from 
myself that recent events have too rudely jostled 
the unity of your Cabinet, and disclosed an opinion 
too deeply seated and too generally received in 
Congress and in the country, to be disregarded, 
that the concord in judgment and action, essen- 
tial for successful administration, does not prevail 
among its members." 

Although it cannot be actually proven, it is prob- 
able that Chase had expected Seward to join him 
in making some definite terms with the President. 
If it be so, the scheme was broken up by Seward's 
eagerness to have the President's protection, and 
Lincoln came out of the controversy with much 
greater prestige than either of the two secretaries. 
For a few days there were threats of military con- 
spiracies to depose both the President and cabinet, 
but the issuance of the final Proclamation of Eman- 
cipation swept the affair out of sight. On Janu- 
ary 26, 1863, Chase wrote to Greeley : " Let us get 
the measures necessary to the success of any Ke- 
publican administration adopted, and then let the 
cabinet be reconstructed if you will. For one I 
am quite willing to be reconstructed." 

Two months later, however, the Secretary of the 
Treasury could not forbear again measuring his 
powers against those of the President. The issue 
was the rejection by the Senate of the nomination 
of Mark Howard to be the collector of internal 
revenue in Connecticut. Chase believed that the 
rebuff was due to the personal influence of Senator 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 305 

Dixon, and he demanded categorically that no per- 
son proposed by Dixon should be appointed, and 
that he himself should nominate to the vacancy. 
When the President decided to select a name on 
Dixon's list, Chase protested ; and though the diffi- 
culty was removed by personal conference between 
Dixon and Chase, the secretary could not forbear 
laying down a new ultimatum : "To secure fit men 
for responsible place, without admitting the rights 
of senators or representatives to control appoint- 
ments, for which the President and the Secretary, 
as his presumed adviser, must be responsible. Un- 
less these points can be practically established, I 
feel that I can not be useful to you or the country 
in my present position." As the President still 
stood by the prerogatives of his office, Chase pre- 
pared a note of resignation, but the dangerous 
paper was withdrawn, and a second time the sec- 
retary reassumed his functions. 

Three months later, in May, 1863, trouble came 
up again over one of Chase's subordinates. One 
of the early appointments made by the President, 
at Chase's express desire, was that of Victor Smith 
of Cincinnati to be collector of Puget Sound. 
Smith had been a personal friend of Chase, and 
went away owing him money, perhaps remnants of 
old transactions, perhaps sums borrowed in order 
to pay his passage to his new post of duty. Smith 
went out to his office full of zeal, and wrote fre- 
quent and confidential letters to the secretary. 
He very soon became engaged in land speculations 



306 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

and made strenuous efforts to have the Custom 
House removed to a little place which he was try- 
ing to build up. By temperament and reputation 
he was not fitted for the important post given to 
him, and eventually charges of corruption were 
brought against him, and strong pressure against 
him was put upon the President by members of 
Congress from the Pacific coast. For the charges 
there seems to have been no sufficient ground, but 
Lincoln notified Chase that his mind was made up 
to remove Smith on the ground that " the degree of 
dissatisfaction with him there is too great for him 
to be retained." Finally, in Chase's absence the 
President did remove him, whereupon Chase wrote 
a solemn letter claiming the right to be consulted 
on the appointment of persons " for whose action I 
must be largely responsible." He protested against 
the appointment of the successor of Smith, and 
ended with saying : " If you find anything in my 
views to which your own sense of duty will not per- 
mit you to assent, I will unhesitatingly relieve you 
from all embarrassment, so far as I am concerned, 
by tendering you my resignation." The Presi- 
dent felt the matter to be so serious that he went 
himself to Chase's house ; as he told a friend after- 
wards : " I went directly up to him with the resig- 
nation in my hand, and, putting my arm around 
his neck, said to him, ' Chase, here is a paper with 
which I wish to have nothing to do ; take it back 
and be reasonable.' I told him that I couldn't 
replace the person whom I had removed — that 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 307 

was impossible — but that I would appoint any one 
else whom he should select for the place. It was 
difficult to bring him to terms ; I had to plead with 
him a long time, but I finally succeeded, and heard 
nothing more of that resignation." Smith took the 
matter better than did his superior, and accepted 
his removal with good nature ; but the continued 
strain of these differences between the President 
and secretary was beginning to tell upon the good 
humor of both, and the question of the nomination 
of 1864 now came in to sow still greater dissensions. 
To understand the point of view of Secretary 
Chase in the preliminary canvass of 1863 and 1864, 
we must remember that to his mind and that of 
most of the old Republicans Mr. Lincoln was an 
accidental President. Congress pulled against him, 
and Seward, Stanton, and Chase, each in his own 
way, tested the President's mastery. Stanton's 
practice was occasionally to defy the President in 
minor matters by refusing to carry out his orders, 
or by returning a commission with the curt in- 
dorsement : " The President may get another Sec- 
retary of War, but this Secretary of War will not 
sign that paper." Aware of Stanton's infirmity of 
temper, and sincerely prizing his administrative 
power and his undeniable abilities and patriotism, 
the President gave way in many small matters, but 
was tenacious on questions of principle. Seward 
yielded easily in details, but occasionally ventured 
to take upon himself a responsibility which be- 
longed to the President, as for instance in his 



/ 



308 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

promise to the British ambassador that the mails 
of prizes should be sent to England unbroken, a 
promise which enraged the Secretary of the Navy. 
Chase's habit was that of direct obedience where 
the President gave a disagreeable order, accom- 
panied, in what he thought critical affairs, by a 
threat of resignation. His method had its founda- 
tion in the assurances of Chase's correspondents 
all over the country that he was the mainstay of 
the administration. He could not help knowing 
that his was the most effective and successful of 
the great departments of the government, and his 
position as a leader in anti-slavery movements gave 
him weight in the cabinet. However wearisome it 
may have been for the President to be called on 
so often to dispel the clouds in his secretary's 
mind, he had at least the assurance that Chase 
would not disregard his directions, nor usurp pre- 
sidential powers. 

The war was but a part of the President's anx- 
ieties. He understood that he was dependent on 
the support of a majority in Congress, and he felt 
that upon him fell the duty of maintaining such 
influence in the country at large as would give him 
the support of state governors and administrations, 
and would keep Congress in line. This political 
function was always before his mind; and when 
the question of the Republican nomination of 1864 
arose, there was a rivalry between him and Chase 
which accentuated minor differences. Chase, too, 
felt the keenest interest in keeping up the Repub- 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 309 

lican majority in Congress ; but one of the effects, 
foreseen but inevitable, of the first proclamation 
of emancipation was an increase of the Democratic 
vote in Ohio and Indiana, and the consequent 
election of many Democratic members of Congress ; 
and Chase's influence could not stay the tide. 

From the early part of 1862 Chase had also in 
mind the presidential nomination of 1864 ; but for 
some time his only share in the agitation was to 
try to heal dissensions in his own party, and espe- 
cially to come into pleasanter relations with Sena- 
tor Wade. In the spring of 1863 the canvass 
began to take more distinct form, and Chase al- 
lowed it to be known that he was willing to accept 
any responsibility that the country might think 
proper to impose on him. In August, 1863, his 
friends were openly suggesting him for the presi- 
dency ; and although he repeatedly expressed a pre- 
ference for " a judicial position," he felt sure that 
" he could administer the government of this coun- 
try so as to secure . . . our institutions." In Octo- 
ber he went out to Ohio and took part in the state 
election by making a series of excellent speeches. 
Greeley took up his cause, and in private corre- 
spondence expressed the hope that he would be 
nominated. 

The motives in Chase's mind are well expressed 
in an intimate letter of November 26, 1863. " I 
doubt the expediency of reelecting anybody, and 
I think a man of different qualities from those the 
President has will be needed for the next four 



310 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

years. ... I can never permit myself to be driven 
into any hostility or unfriendly position as to Mr. 
Lincoln. His course toward me has always been 
so fair and kind ; his progress toward entire agree- 
ment with me on the great question of slavery has 
been so constant, though rather slower than I 
wished for, and his general character is so marked 
by traits which command respect and affection, 
that I can never consent to anything which he him- 
self could or would consider as incompatible with 
perfect honor and good faith, if I were capable — 
which I hope I am not — of a departure from 
either, even where an enemy might be concerned.' ' 
The interpretation of this sincere and creditable 
letter is very clear : Chase saw no reason why he 
should not seek the nomination of the convention, 
and prepared the way for it by the organization of 
his friends ; but he would not take part in any 
effort to divide the Republican party. At the 
same time his old delusion as to the free principles 
of the regular Democracy came up to plague him. 
He had some dim idea of making a combination of 
Republicans and war Democrats, on the platform 
of freedom ; of such a combination he would have 
been the logical candidate. 

That his canvass showed disloyalty to Lincoln did 
not enter his mind ; for in 1863 the real strength of 
Lincoln before the people was not evident to Con- 
gress nor to some of the greatest Republican news- 
papers, and there was a disposition to hold him 
responsible for every military defeat, and to give 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 311 

credit to the generals for all the victories ; nobody- 
could then predict that Lincoln would be renom- 
inated, and to Chase's mind the field was fair and 
open. 

A great pressure was now put upon the secretary 
to make political use of his enormous patronage 
throughout the Union. Some of his nominees, 
especially in southern Ohio and the Pacific coast, 
were anxious to press him for the presidency ; but 
the executive journals of the Senate bear indubita- 
ble testimony to the fact that, after the first series 
of appointments in 1861, removals in the Treasury 
Department were very few, probably no more than 
were justified by incompetency and fraud; and 
that, so far from building up a treasury machine, 
he resisted the piteous appeals of his friends to 
reorganize the Custom House in New York and 
other important offices. Collector Barney had 
many enemies, who worked upon the President to 
remove him ; yet, in a place where the temptation 
was strong and the power unquestioned, Chase 
forbore to use his patronage for his own advantage, 
and thereby he incurred the reproaches and even 
the scorn of some would-be supporters. All the 
evidence bears him out in his own statement of 
January, 1864 : " I should despise myself if I were 
capable of appointing or removing a man for the 
sake of the presidency." 

Early in Chase's canvass it appeared that he had 
not the open support of a single great party leader, 
and his smaller friends brought upon him a need- 



f 



312 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

less humiliation and took away every chance of his 
nomination by the so-called Pomeroy Circular, is- 
sued in February, 1864, by a committee purporting 
to be in charge of Chase's canvass, headed by Sen- 
ator Pomeroy of Kansas, who was known to be a 
friend of the secretary. The circular asserted that 
Chase had "more of the qualities needed in a 
President, during the next four years, than are 
combined in any other available candidate ; " but 
it also declared that " the cause of human liberty 
and the dignity of the nation " suffered from Lin- 
coln's tendency toward compromise ; and that the 
growth of the patronage of the government de- 
manded a one-term principle. The circular there- 
fore distinctly measured the two men against each 
other, and attempted to build up Chase's fortunes 
by depressing the President's. 

This premature and unwise action put Chase in 
a very serious dilemma. He wrote one of his long 
letters to the President, explaining that he had 
indeed conferred with the committee, but had no 
part in their circular, and for at least the fourth 
time he intimated that he was ready to withdraw 
from the Treasury if the President thought best. 
Chase's mortification was made plain in a letter to 
Greeley a few days later, with an account of Lin- 
coln's answer: "To this he replied, closing with 
the statement that there was nothing in the condi- 
tion of the public interests which called for a 
change in the headship of my department ; but 
there was no response in his letter to the senti- 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 313 

ments of respect and esteem which mine contained. 
But this is not remarkable. Whatever apprecia- 
tion he may feel for the public service he i? <er 
expresses any. So I have worked on." 

Under such conditions Chase's continuance in 
the treasury was only possible if no new accident 
came up to disturb the truce. From various causes, 
but chiefly from the necessary restrictions on trade 
in the Southwest, Chase had the ill-will of many 
of the Kepublican politicians of Missouri, and espe- 
cially of the two Blair brothers, who together formed 
a considerable political power ; and Chase consid- 
ered their relations to him " all the more embar- 
rassing by their uncontradicted claim to be the 
special representative of the policy and views of 
Mr. Lincoln." On the 27th of April, 1864, Frank 
P. Blair made a scurrilous attack on Chase in the 
House, asserting that certain statements with regard 
to himself were a forgery prepared by a person in 
the Treasury, "nttered and put in circulation by 
a special agent of the Treasury, and put in a news- 
paper which was pensioned by the Secretary of the 
Treasury." Against Chase he personally brought 
charges of weakness in resisting secession, based 
upon information as to a private cabinet meeting 
communicated by his brother, Montgomery ; Blair 
at last worked himself up to the charge that Chase 
was using his authority to control border inter- 
course and to collect abandoned property "as a 
fund to carry on his war against the administra- 
tion which gave him place." 



314 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

No wonder Chase was that night found in a 
condition of violent rage ; and that, when he 
learned that after this speech the President had 
carried out a long standing promise of reviving 
Blair's commission as major-general in the army, 
he was on the point of resigning. It was not a 
question on which Lincoln cared to make an issue. 
To him the Blairs had become disagreeable annoy- 
ances, to be palliated as much as possible. The 
President told Chase's friends that he had restored 
Blair to the army before his speech. "Within 
three hours I heard that this speech had been made, 
when I knew that another bee-hive was knocked 
over. My first thought was to have canceled the 
orders restoring him to the army, and assigning 
him to command. Perhaps this would have been 
best. On such information as I was able to gain 
about the matter, however, I concluded to let 
them stand." The matter was thus patched up 
for the time being, and in the course of the next 
few weeks it became evident that Lincoln was cer- 
tain to be renominated. Even in Ohio, despite 
the strong efforts of Chase's friends, the Republi- 
can members of the state legislature passed a re- 
solution in favor of Lincoln ; and on April 26 
Chase wrote a public letter of withdrawal. 

When on June 7 the Baltimore Convention re- 
nominated Lincoln, Chase's friendly relations with 
the President ought once for all to have been re- 
established : thereafter, no longer a rival, he might 
have gone steadily forward with his own important 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 315 

duties. It was, however, a dark period in the 
financial history of the war : the credit of the gov- 
ernment measured by its legal tender notes was 
steadily declining, and the strain on Chase's mind 
and temper was growing more and more severe, till 
it culminated in the Gold Bill of June 17. An 
unusual self-abnegation on Chase's part might have 
prevented a rupture, but that self-abnegation he 
did not show, for even after the nomination he felt 
injured and sore. Another cloud now arose in the 
New York Custom House. On June 6, the Presi- 
dent called on Chase, and pressed for the removal 
of Barney, to whom he had previously offered a 
diplomatic position. This personal conference re- 
moved the difficulty for the time being ; there is 
some reason to suppose that Chase again threat- 
ened to resign, and that the President again gave 
way. 

A few days later, another question of patronage 
in New York came up, by the action of John J. 
Cisco, in resigning his post of assistant treasurer, 
because the office, one of great fiduciary import- 
ance, was underpaid. Mr. Chase at once noti- 
fied Lincoln that he would himself shortly desig- 
nate a successor. After several failures to secure 
an eminent New York financier, he offered the 
place to Maunsell B. Field, then assistant secretary 
of the Treasury. Senator Morgan, of New York, 
insisted that it was necessary to appoint a man 
who would reorganize the assistant treasurer's 
office, and turn out a lot of the clerks. The issue 



316 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

was decidedly offensive to Chase, who felt himself 
assaulted in his prerogative of appointing his im- 
mediate and confidential subordinates, and who 
was himself called upon to assent to the political 
dismissal of experienced subordinates. 

Field's remembrance of the President's account 
to him of the whole transaction is characteristic 
and probably not far from correct. " The Repub- 
lican party in your State is divided into two fac- 
tions, and I can't afford to quarrel with them. 
By accident rather than by any design of mine, the 
radicals have got possession of the most important 
Federal offices in New York. . . . Had I under 
these circumstances consented to your appoint- 
ment, it would have been another radical triumph, 
and I could n't afford one." 

Nevertheless the President bent himself to a 
peaceful settlement of the perplexing question : he 
promoted a conference between Senator Morgan 
and Chase, and promised to appoint any man upon 
whom Chase and the New York senators could 
agree. But when Chase asked for a personal con- 
ference, the President replied that he hesitated, 
" because the difficulty does not, in the main part, 
lie within the range of a conversation with you. 
As the proverb goes, ' No man knows so well 
where the shoe pinches as he who wears it.' ' ; 

On June 29, Chase solved the difficulty by per- 
suading Cisco to withdraw his resignation; and 
there the matter might have ended, had he so 
chosen ; but he had already written a letter of re- 



CHASE AND LINCOLN 317 

signation, which he could not deny himself the 
satisfaction of sending, as a suggestion of the dan- 
ger which had been escaped. " I can not help 
feeling," said he, " that my position here is not 
altogether agreeable to you ; and it is certainly 
too full of embarrassment and difficulty and pain- 
ful responsibility, to allow in me the least desire to 
retain it. I think it my duty, therefore, to inclose 
to you my resignation. I shall regard it as a real 
relief if you think proper to accept it, and will 
most cheerfully render to my successor any aid he 
may find useful in entering upon his duties." 

This fourth or perhaps fifth formal resignation of 
Secretary Chase ended his official life. The Presi- 
dent unexpectedly accepted it, and though the next 
day Chase hinted to Stanton, " I feared you might 
be prompted by your generous sentiment to take 
some step injurious to the country," no other mem- 
ber of the Cabinet stirred. In truth, Chase was 
taken by surprise that the President had not put 
the resignation through the usual course of remon- 
strance, argumeut, and recall ; and his anger and 
disappointment are too frankly recorded in his own 
diary : " There I found a letter from the President, 
accepting my resignation, and putting the accept- 
ance on the ground of the difference between us 
indicating a degree of embarrassment in our official 
relations which could not be continued or sustained 
consistently with the public service. I had found 
a good deal of embarrassment from him ; but what 
he had found from me I could not imagine, unless 



318 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

it has been caused by my unwillingness to have 
offices distributed as spoils or benefits, with more 
regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques, 
and individuals, than to fitness of selection. He 
had never given me the active and earnest support 
I was entitled to; and even now Congress was 
about to adjourn without passing sufficient tax bills, 
though making appropriations with lavish profu- 
sion, and he was, notwithstanding my appeals, tak- 
ing no pains to insure a different result." 

The real reason for the resignation was expressed 
by Chase in a private conference with Whitelaw 
Reid : " He supposed that the root of the matter 
was a difficulty of temperament. The truth is 
that I have never been able to make a joke out of 
this war." At first he could not believe that he 
was actually out of the administration. When his 
successor, Fessenden, informed him that the Presi- 
dent had asked him not to remove Chase's friends, 
Chase entered in his diary : " Had the President 
in the reply to my note tendering my resignation 
expressed himself as he did now to Mr. Fessenden, 
I should have cheerfully withdrawn it." And when 
Sumner suggested that he might be recalled as 
Necker had been in France a century earlier, he 
replied that Lincoln was no Louis the Sixteenth. 




^r /? ?Uf*~*6^ 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE JUDICIAL PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 

In au article written in early life, Chase eulo- 
gized Chief Justice Marshall, "whose decisions 
upon the delicate and important questions at this 
period perpetually arising, by their wisdom, their 
justice, and their explicitness, commend themselves 
equally to the understanding, the conscience, and 
the heart of all our citizens." An interest in the 
position of chief justice never ceased to influence 
him. While still a senator he said to a friend that 
there were two offices which he should like to hold : 
" I should like to be chief justice of the Supreme 
Court and overrule all the pro-slavery decisions; 
I should like to be President of the United States 
and reverse the policy of the administration as 
Jefferson reversed it." When, in the third year 
of the secretaryship, Taney was known to be fail- 
ing, the thought was evidently in Chase's mind 
that he himself might be the successor. He had 
already dropped the remark to the President, that 
he " would rather be Chief Justice than hold any 
other position that could be given ; " and in July, 
1864, Lincoln told the Senate Committee on Fi- 
nance that he should appoint him to the office if 



320 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

there were a vacancy. He afterward said to Car- 
penter that " there had never been a time during 
his presidency when, in the event of the death of 
Judge Taney, he had not fully intended and ex- 
pected to nominate Salmon P. Chase for chief 
justice." Hence it is probable that if the death of 
Taney had occurred in the spring of 1864 instead 
of in October, Chase would have been at once 
transferred, in time to prevent the pain and humili- 
ation of his retirement from the treasury. Mean- 
while after his withdrawal he said many bitter 
things of Lincoln, and for three months he hung 
back in the presidential campaign ; not until Sep- 
tember did he begin to work on the stump in 
behalf of the [Republican ticket. That he was 
unaware of Lincoln's magnanimous purpose seems 
clear from the strong but unsuccessful attempt of 
his friends, in August, to secure for him a nomi- 
nation from the Cincinnati district to the lower 
house of Congress. 

As soon as the presidential election was over, the 
President set himself seriously to the selection of 
a successor to Taney. Candidates were numerous : 
Justice Swayne of Ohio desired and manoeuvred 
for promotion, and had the powerful support of 
Justice David Davis, a personal friend of Lincoln ; 
Montgomery Blair, who had been cast out of the 
cabinet, sought for the nomination ; Chase at one 
time believed that Stanton was the person to be 
designated; of another candidate put forward by 
Massachusetts men, Chase said : " Evarts is a man 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 321 

of sterling abilities and excellent learning and a 
much greater lawyer than I ever pretended to be. 
The truth is, I always thought myself much overesti- 
mated. And yet I think I have more judgment 
than Evarts, and that tried by the Marshall stand- 
ard [I] should make a better judge; while he 
might, tried by the Story standard." Chase's 
warmest friend and most effective supporter was 
Sumner, who thought that months earlier he had 
secured a promise for his friend from Lincoln ; 
and he did not cease to press his candidate. 

On the other side there was a strong objection 
to Chase from leading Kepublicans the country 
over ; delegations appeared from Ohio, and protests 
were filed. Lincoln had no longer any personal 
rivalry to fear, but those who were nearest to him 
were at the time convinced that he hesitated be- 
cause he feared that Chase would make the bench 
a stepping-stone to the White House ; when Riddle, 
at Chase's urgent request, waited on Lincoln to 
urge his claims, the President asked him whether 
Chase would be satisfied to remain chief justice; 
His own recent differences with his imperious 
secretary, and even the reports of Chase's exasper- 
ated comments, made so little impression on Lin- 
coln that on December 6 Chase was nominated for 
the chief justiceship and forthwith confirmed by 
the Senate without reference to committee. He 
accepted the appointment in a very warm note* 
assuring Lincoln that he prized his confidence and 
good-will more than any nomination to office. 



322 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Upon the whole the appointment seemed ju- 
dicious and was well received. It was true that 
Chase's experience had been chiefly legislative ; but 
it was also true that both Marshall and Taney had 
been appointed from cabinet offices and not from 
active practice or the bench ; and that the immedi- 
ate questions which confronted the court required 
less a consummate knowledge of law than a broad 
statesmanship, which could take into account the 
significant legal and political changes brought 
about by the Civil War, together with such a sense 
of the dignity of the court as might restore its 
weakened prestige. 

Although Chase had never sat upon the bench, 
he fell easily into the routine of the court, and 
interested himself in improving its library and 
other facilities. He was thought by some of the 
subordinate judicial officers to be unduly severe ; 
and sometimes freely criticised the reporter or even 
associate justices for what he thought inaccurate 
statements of his opinions. He had in his hands 
a considerable patronage, of which the most valu- 
able was the designation of the marshalship of 
the Supreme Court. The incumbent when Chase 
assumed his office was Ward H. Lamon, a personal 
friend of Lincoln ; but Chase complained of his 
accounts ; he retired in June, 1865. The chief 
justice took an opportunity in April, 1867, to secure 
the appointment of his intimate friend, Richard 
C. Parsons, of Cleveland. Unfortunately, in 1872, 
Parsons became involved in a lobbying enterprise 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 323 

with Judge Charles Sherman, the result of which 
was that both were compelled to resign, and John 
G. Nicolay was appointed in Parsons' place. 

In 1867 the new bankruptcy act required the 
commissioning of a large number of registers in 
bankruptcy. Since Congress was unwilling to give 
additional patronage to the President, it made the 
unusual provision that the registers should be ap- 
pointed by the district courts, but only on recom- 
mendations by the chief justice. Barney wrote to 
Chase from New York : " At least three hundred 
members of the bar have asked me for letters re- 
commending them or their friends for register." 
The distribution of this patronage gave the chief 
justice much annoyance, but also a power, which 
he highly enjoyed, of pleasing his friends and of 
exercising his discrimination. 

No man in the history of the country, except 
perhaps John Jay, has ever had such opportunities 
for experience in all three of the great depart- 
ments of the government. Chase had been senator 
and had seen much of the working of Congress dur- 
ing the Civil War, had been the most important 
figure in a cabinet, and was now to learn the inner 
workings of the federal judiciary department. He 
found it in a depressed and humiliated condition, 
its jurisdiction limited by the creation of extra- 
judicial tribunals, its machinery embarrassed by 
an outgrown, clumsy, and laborious system of cir- 
cuits. The Supreme Court, although it still con- 
tinued its decisions in cases of private law, showed 



324 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

little vitality during the Civil War, and avoided 
decisions which bore on the great questions then 
before the country. 

In 1864 the court was undergoing the process 
of rapid renewal, which it had experienced twice 
before in the history of the country : between 1804 
and 1811 five of the seven justices were newly ap- 
pointed ; and again, between 1829 and 1837, Jack- 
son had the nomination of six of the nine judges ; 
and the court which he thus reconstituted at once 
took more conservative ground on the powers of 
Congress and the limitations on the States. Lin- 
coln found among the nine justiceships one vacancy 
which had not been filled by Buchanan ; and the 
death of McLean in April, 1861, and the resigna- 
tion of Campbell in May, 1861, together with a 
tenth justiceship created by the act of March 3, 
1863, and the death of Taney in 1864, gave the 
opportunity of replacing five conservative judges 
with Eepublicans and anti-slavery men. For some 
time Lincoln hesitated to use his power. In his 
annual message of 1861, he pointed out the diffi- 
culties due to the existence of civil war in two of 
the vacant districts, and said: "I have been un- 
willing to throw all the appointments northward, 
thus disabling myself from doing justice to the 
South on the return of peace." He proposed the 
creation of additional circuit judges, to relieve the 
supreme justices from the increasing labor of ser- 
vice on circuit. 

In 1862 Lincoln overcame these scruples, and 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 325 

appointed in quick succession Swayne of Ohio, 
Miller of Iowa, and Davis of Illinois ; in 1863 lie 
added Field of California as tenth justice ; and in 
1864 he appointed Chase. Though _Catron died 
in JVlay. 1865. and Wayne in 1867, no successors 
to them were appointed, and no further change 
occurred till after the first legal-tender decision in 
1870. From 1865 to 1870 the court remained 
made up of Lincoln's five appointees, together with 
Nelson, Grier, Clifford, and (till 1867) Wayne. 

It had thus unexpectedly been put into the 
power of Lincoln to carry out a plan which he him- 
self suggested in 1858, the plan of reorganizing 
the Supreme Court till it should reverse the Dred 
Scott decision ; but before a majority of the judges 
had been obtained, the spirit of the Dred Scott 
decision was effectually reversed by the Thirteenth 
Amendment ; and precisely as had happened under 
Jefferson and Madison, it was found that the re- 
constructed court inherited the conservative spirit 
of its predecessors. The Supreme Court continued 
to hold fast to its time-honored principles on pub- 
lic law and private rights rather than to set up a 
new regime ; and Chase's influence bore for caution 
and restraint, and not for radical changes. 

Notwithstanding the violent legislation of the 
Civil War, and the disturbance of property rights 
caused by military movements, the Supreme Court 
from 1861 to 1864 pronounced but three decisions 
on what could fairly be considered political cases ; 
and in neither of the three did it stand against 



326 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

authority claimed by Congress or the President. 
In the first of these cases (State of New York v. 
Commissioners of Taxes, 1862-63) the court held 
that a State could not tax bank capital which stood 
in "the form of United States securities. The deci- 
sion in the Prize Cases of 1863 gave the Supreme 
Court an opportunity to acknowledge the existence 
of " civil war," and the right of the President to 
declare a blockade, while it held also that the war 
" may be called an ' insurrection ' by one side, and 
the insurgents be considered as rebels or traitors ; " 
and all persons residing within the Southern lines 
were " liable to be treated as enemies." The deci- 
sion plainly applied the principles of international 
law to the struggle, without denying that in the 
end the participants might also be subjected to the 
penalties of the municipal law. 

Various attempts were made to secure from the 
Supreme Court a decision against the arbitrary 
powers assumed by Congress and the President; 
but, though the court held back, Chief Justice 
Taney delivered an opinion in the case of Ex 'parte 
Merryman, which was intended to be a protest 
against the suspension of habeas corpus by execu- 
tive regulation. In May, 1861, Merryman was 
arrested in Maryland on a charge of treason, and 
confined in Fort McHenry. Taney sitting alone on 
the Circuit bench issued a writ of habeas corpus, to 
which the military officer — though no public notice 
of any executive orders had been given — replied 
that he was authorized by the President to sus- 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 327 

pend the writ of habeas corpus for the public 
safety. Taney thereupon ordered the arrest of the 
officer, on the ground that there was no process 
short of an act of Congress which could justify 
military detention of a civilian, and that the Presi- 
dent had no constitutional authority to suspend the 
habeas corpus, and of course none to delegate such 
suspension. The marshal was, however, by mili- 
tary force prevented from serving the writ, and 
Taney, with a clear understanding of his helpless- 
ness, certified his decision to the President, in 
order that, as he said, that officer might " perform 
his constitutional duty to enforce the laws ; or at 
least to enforce a process of this kind." The Presi- 
dent simply ignored Taney's decision, and through- 
out the war continued to hold suspected persons 
under arrest, at first by his own authority and then 
under legislation obtained from Congress. 

March 3, 1863, Congress passed an act authoriz- 
ing the suspension of habeas corpus by the Presi- 
dent, and this was subsequently construed to au- 
thorize military commissions even within the limits 
of Northern States removed from the theatre of 
war. The only legal authority for such action was 
to be sought in a broad and dangerous extension 
of the power to make war, and it ignored the ordi- 
nary judiciary. In the Vallandigham Case, in 
February, 1864 (the third of the political cases 
brought before the court) an attempt was made to 
reverse the decision of a military commission held 
in Ohio, which condemned Vallandigham for offen- 



328 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

sive and treasonable utterances in public speeches. 
The Supreme Court, however, refused to interfere, 
basing its decision on the technical ground that, 
whatever the merits of the case, it had no jurisdic- 
tion, because there was no legal method of appeal- 
ing from a military commission to the Supreme 
Court. 

On slavery, on the validity of the acts of the 
seceded States under the Confederacy, and on the 
relation of those States to the Union, the Supreme 
Court expressed no opinion ; and, so far as possi- 
ble, it staved off cases which involved such ques- 
tions. At the end of 1865, Chase informed the 
President : " The Supreme Court has hitherto de- 
clined to consider cases brought before it by bill 
or writs of error from circuit or district courts in 
the rebellious portion of the country." This prin- 
ciple applied even in those parts of Virginia within 
the Union lines, in which the federal courts had 
maintained a formal existence. Chase himself, 
when he first faced the problems likely to come 
before the court, intimated to a friend that he 
might be more useful off the bench than on it 
" when the reorganization comes about ; " but his 
correspondent replied : " The Supreme Court may 
be the great power yet that is to settle the great 
questions upon which perhaps may depend the 
perpetuity of our government." 

This prophecy was soon to be justified, for within 
two years after Chase's appointment the court had 
begun to render a series of brilliant and far-reach- 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 329 

ing decisions, which at the same time restored its 
own prestige, crystallized the body of law arising 
out of the Civil War, and moderated the excesses 
of Congress. All the questions which finally stood 
forth for judicial decision had been presented to 
Chase while he was still Secretary of the Treasury, 
and upon most of them he had then made up his 
mind. The first and most difficult inquiry was, 
What is the legal status of the seceded States? 
The second was, By whose authority shall they be 
allowed to resume their place in the Union after 
the war ? A third was, What shall be the status 
and punishment of the individuals who have joined 
in the rebellion ? The fourth question, which grew 
more important throughout the war and was the 
last of all to be completely decided was, What legal 
and political status shall be given to the negro ? 

On all these points Lincoln early took ground, 
and on nearly all Chase opposed him. Lincoln's 
theory of the status of the States was set forth in 
his own fashion in an argument which he made 
in July, 1862 : " Broken eggs cannot be mended ; 
but Louisiana has nothing to do now but to take 
her place in the Union as it was, barring the 
already broken eggs. The sooner she does so, 
the smaller will be the amount of that which will 
be past mending. This government cannot much 
longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its 
enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must un- 
derstand that they cannot experiment for ten years 
trying to destroy the government, and if they fail 



330 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

still come back into the Union unhurt." This pun- 
gent statement indicated Lincoln's purpose to re- 
store the States as soon as they were sufficiently- 
cleared of the Confederate troops, and he carried 
out his policy in 1862 by favoring the admission 
of West Virginia with a separate state govern- 
ment, and by securing through his military com- 
manders a choice of two congressmen from Louisi- 
ana ; and the House of Representatives admitted 
the principle by admitting those two as members. 
Chase was from the first opposed both to the prin- 
ciple of presidential reconstruction, and to the 
method ; for he could not accept the idea that the 
States were to come back into the Union whenever 
they withdrew from the Confederacy. In March, 

1862, he gave his adhesion to the theory that " the 
government in suppression of rebellion, in view of 
the destruction by suicide of the State governments 
with the actual or strongly implied consent of the 
majority of the citizens of the several rebel States 
[which] have so far forfeited all right to be re- 
garded as States, might justly treat them as terri- 
tories," and he preferred to have Congress assert 
authority to set up provisional governments in place 
of those supported by the President. 

On the question of the Southern whites, Lincoln 
took ground by his proclamation of December 8, 

1863, in which he prescribed a test oath, which 
committed the taker to support all acts of Con- 
gress and proclamations of the President with re- 
gard to slavery, " so long and so far as not repealed, 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 331 

modified, or held void by Congress or by decision 
of the Supreme Court." He promised to recognize 
such state government in each of the seceded 
States as might be set up by persons who could 
and would take the oath and were in number not 
less than one tenth of the vote cast at the election 
of 1860. This meant that the authority in the 
reconstructed States should be committed to such 
of the whites as had not held conspicuous stations 
in the service of the Confederacy and were willing 
to accept the emancipation proclamation. Chase 
criticised this proposition, which indeed had many 
elements of weakness. " I don't like the qualifi- 
cation in the oath required," said he, "nor the 
limitation of the right of suffrage to those who 
take the oath, and are otherwise qualified accord- 
ing to the state laws in force before rebellion. I 
fear these are fatal concessions. Why should not 
all soldiers who fight for their country vote in it ? " 
On the question of the negroes Chase held the 
strongest convictions of his life, and he protested 
against excluding them from a share in the recon- 
structed governments. During 1863 Chase put 
forth a strong pressure for the reorganization of 
Florida, of which a small tract in the neighborhood 
of Fernandina and Jacksonville was occupied by 
Federal troops. His interest in this enterprise led 
him to analyze more carefully the conditions of the 
problem. As a result he came to see how import- 
ant was the future of the negro, and how hard it 
would be to protect him. He proposed arming the 



332 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

" loyal native population, white and black," and 
holding back the States from reconstruction till 
they should abolish slavery. By the beginning of 
1864 he was writing of " the free labor and free 
suffrage basis," and had proposed to his agents in 
Louisiana to secure negro suffrage with an educa- 
tional clause. 

Meanwhile Congress had become aroused to the 
gravity of the problem, and to the immense power 
which the President proposed to exercise, by him- 
self deciding the conditions of reentrance to the 
Union ; aud in July, 1864, the so-called " Davis- 
Wade Bill " brought the President and Congress 
into sharp collision over the fundamental question 
as to which of the two authorities was to determine 
when the States were ready to reassume their place 
in the Union. Though the bill authorized the 
President to set up provisional state govern- 
ments, it provided that these were to be trans- 
formed into permanent governments only through 
action of Congress. Accordingly Lincoln refused 
to sign it, and took the unusual step of issuing a 
proclamation, declaring his purpose to decide that 
question himself. During the adjournment of 
Congress and the campaign of 1864, Lincoln on 
his own responsibility caused the reorganization of 
state governments in Louisiana, Arkansas, and 
Tennessee ; and had he lived to the session of 1865- 
1866, the conflict of his authority with that of 
Congress must have again come up in a more seri- 
ous form. 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 333 

The assassination of Lincoln, and the accession 
of a man who hated the dominant white element in 
the South, threw the whole scheme of reconstruc- 
tion into confusion ; and during the year 1865 the 
conditions of the South and the dimensions of the 
problem began to be more clearly appreciated in 
the North. The most important question at the 
outset was the status of the Southern whites. 
Events had long since destroyed the belief, held 
at the beginning of the war, that a large majority 
in most of the Southern States was really opposed 
to secession ; nearly all the able-bodied men in 
the South went into the Confederate Army, or at 
least into the civil service of the Confederacy or 
the state governments. If secession were treason, 
almost all Southerners had involved themselves in 
the penalties for the act ; and general convictions 
and executions would-be very like massacres. 

Economically the South was prostrate. The 
great slaveholders, who had held the most impor- 
tant stations before the war and the most dangerous 
responsibilities during it, had met financial ruin. 
Their invested funds had gone directly or indirectly 
into Confederate loans ; their accumulations had 
been swept away by the demands of the war ; large 
numbers of their negroes either were wanderers or 
had disappeared altogether. Only the soil was 
left, and even that in many cases had been devas- 
tated by campaigns. Politically the old leaders 
were for the time overborne ; some were in exile, 
and many were glad to seek obscurity; a few, 



334 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

including Jefferson Davis, were in the hands of the 
federal government, and it was expected that an 
example would be made of them by trials for 
treason. 

In May, 1865, practically under commission of 
the President, Chase made a visit to the Southern 
ports of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, 
returning by the Mississippi River. He reported to 
the President a belief that many of the white men 
who had engaged in the rebellion would be glad to 
take a loyal part in the reconstructed government : 
but before he returned Johnson had issued his 
proclamation of May 29, 1865, granting general 
amnesty and pardon to such as would take an oath 
to support all laws and proclamations made, during 
the rebellion, with reference to the emancipation 
of slaves. From the privileges of this amnesty, 
however, he excluded fourteen classes of persons, 
including nearly all those who had shown energy 
and character during the Civil War. It was there- 
fore apparent that the President intended to let the 
poor whites organize and carry on the Southern 
state governments with the assistance of such of 
the more distinguished persons as he might indi- 
vidually pardon. The class upon which Johnson 
depended was not equal to the responsibility which 
he thrust upon it. The former small slaveholders 
stood not far from where they had been at the 
beginning of the war, for they could easily replace 
their lost slaves with hired laborers, and they were 
not on the lists of proscriptions. The poor whites, 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 335 

notwithstanding their great sacrifice of life during 
the war, found their condition hardly altered. 
Throughout the South was also a sprinkling of 
Northerners, in many cases former federal officers, 
who had taken part in the founding of the new 
governments in 1865. These "carpet-baggers" 
were already hated, and now, as centres of organi- 
zation for the negroes, they became the point of 
attack by the native Southerners. 

Of all the questions of reconstruction, that in 
which Chase was most interested from beginning 
to end was the status of the negroes. As far back 
as September, 1862, he notes that he " called on 
attorney general about citizenship of colored men. 
Found him adverse to expressing official opinion ; " 
and in an earlier chapter we have seen how faith- 
fully he followed up the interests of the freedman. 
So far as the existence of slavery went, the 
Thirteenth Amendment, declared to be in force in 
December, 1865, was a constitutional guarantee 
which superseded the revocable abolition acts of 
the States reconstructed during that year; and 
it took out of the list of conditions which might be 
imposed upon the States an acknowledgment of 
the freedom of the former slaves; it superseded 
also the special conditions of the amnesty pro- 
clamations of Lincoln and Johnson. There still 
remained a necessity for statutes or constitutional 
amendments to define the judicial and other civil 
rights of the negroes ; and Chase was one of the 
earliest among public men to insist that negro 



336 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

suffrage must be made a general system, and must 
be imposed as a condition of reconstruction. This 
conviction found voice in his last letter to Lincoln, 
April 12, 1865 : " Once I should have been, if not 
satisfied, partially, at least, contented with suffrage 
for the intelligent and for those who had been 
soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suf- 
frage is demanded by sound policy and impartial 
justice." 

During 1865 both the legal and the economic 
status of the negroes were confused and unsatis- 
factory. President Johnson's favored state govern- 
ments in the South showed little sympathy with the 
blacks, and in several of the States, according to 
Chase's own observation, they seemed likely to re- 
turn to a legal restraint very like their former 
bondage. In some cases vagrant laws were passed, 
so stringent that the negroes would practically have 
been again subjected to the forcible control of their 
former masters. 

The war had brought about, not only freedom, 
but great changes in economic conditions. Many 
thousands of the freedmen had abandoned their 
plantations and were still under government super- 
vision ; hence at the end of the war it was found 
necessary to continue the control and support 
which had for several years been carried on under 
military authority. This was done through the 
so-called "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and 
Abandoned Lands," which was created by an act of 
March 3, 1865, and put under the control of a 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 337 

special commissioner. This institution was con- 
tinued by an act of July, 1866, passed over the 
President's veto ; and the United States was thus 
committed to the position of guardian to thousands 
of negroes. The system had Chase's warm sym- 
pathy, and in 1866 he accepted the presidency of 
the " American Freedman's Union Commission," 
one of the benevolent societies intended to carry on 
the work of civilization. Both under government 
supervision and through the missionary associa- 
tions, schools were started, and the negroes showed 
a great desire to learn ; but they were unorganized, 
very ignorant, poor, and dependent upon day wages ; 
and moreover the efforts to relieve them were 
viewed by the Southern people as an attempt to 
give them social equality with white people. 

The conditions of the problem were difficult in 
themselves, and its solution was delayed by the 
unfortunate controversy between President John- 
son and Congress, which began as soon as Congress 
assembled in December, 1866. In the details of 
that controversy and in the discussion of the funda- 
mental basis on which it rested, Chase took little 
part, except so far as the special interests of the 
negroes were concerned. He saw as clearly as 
anybody that peace had brought about a logical 
dilemma from which there was no escape : the war, 
begun in 1861 on the theory that it was impossible 
for a State to withdraw from the Union, ended in 
the plain fact that the seceded States were practi- 
cally out of the Union ; and the President, Con- 



338 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

gress, and the Northern people all took for granted 
that the Southern States should be subjected to 
some kind of expiatory process before individuals 
returned to their former public rights, and before 
communities recovered their privileges as a part 
of the federal government. Significant differences 
of opinion arose over the question as to what the 
expiatory process should be. The Southern people 
supposed that an oath of allegiance to the United 
States would readmit them into its fellowship; 
Johnson took the ground that all the important 
participants in the rebellion would be punished by 
loss of the suffrage, until he should restore the 
privilege by individual pardons; Congress in- 
tended that it was to decide what persons might 
take part in reviving the state governments, and 
was determined that the States as communities 
should be punished by the imposition of humiliat- 
ing conditions of restoration. The only logical 
and consistent theory was that of the Southerners, 
and that was impracticable because it did not se- 
cure to the country the objects for which the war 
had been fought. Restoration by amnesty was not 
popular in Congress under Lincoln, and was im- 
possible under Johnson. It proved in the end that 
the only force capable of settling the controversy 
was the two-thirds majority in both houses of Con- 
gress, through which the President's veto could be, 
and was, relentlessly overridden. But the process 
was long and heated : the first stage ended in the 
appointment of a joint committee on reconstruc- 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 339 

tion, and a joint resolution of March 2, 1866, pro- 
viding that " no senator or representative should be 
admitted into either branch of Congress from any 
of the said States until Congress should have de- 
clared such State entitled to such representation." 

In the discussion of 1865-66 Chase was rather 
a spectator than an actor, but he did not hesitate 
to express his personal opinions on that part of the 
controversy which most interested him, — the status 
of the freedmen; and he was one of the first to 
insist that no seceded State ought to be admitted 
back into the Union until it had given suffrage to 
negroes. He said : " It would really be a greater 
crime to continue slavery itself than to leave the 
only class which, as a class, had been loyal, unpro- 
tected by the ballot." 

As soon as it became evident that Johnson had 
no interest in negro suffrage, and was willing to 
reinstate by his pardoning power a large proportion 
of those who had been concerned in the rebellion, 
Chase found himself separated from the President, 
who no longer invited an expression of his opinion. 
At the same time his friends in the South assured 
him that, without protection from the United 
States, the Union men would be completely over- 
borne and the freedmen in danger. For instance, 
a correspondent wrote: "Criminal law is a dead 
law in Texas, and but few troops are stationed 
among us. As matters stand, Congress might de- 
clare every rebel to be disfranchised, and all would 
vote at the first election. Congress might by law 



340 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

enfranchise every freedman, and not a single freed- 
man would be permitted to vote." 

Chase's sympathy now began to turn toward the 
congressional plan, and he especially approved the 
Civil Rights Act, passed over the President's veto, 
April 9, 1866, which declared " all persons born in 
the United States and not subject to any foreign 
power to be citizens of the United States," and 
provided for equality of civil rights. This was a 
legislative reversal of whatever was left of the Dred 
Scott decision; and the special machinery pro- 
vided to carry out the act was a satirical adapta- 
tion of the clauses of the Fugitive Slave Act of 
1850, which had aroused such an uproar among 
anti-slavery men. 

The act was certain to rouse the opposition of 
the South, and was itself liable to repeal. It 
seemed therefore desirable to put its provisions 
into a constitutional amendment, which would for- 
ever protect the rights of the negroes and which 
at the same time would take out of the hands of 
the President the restoration of former rebels to 
their political status. This suggestion of another 
amendment aroused Chase. On April 30, 1866, 
he wrote to Associate Justice Field that the pro- 
posed plan of congressional reconstruction " seems 
very well, provided it could be carried out ; but I 
am afraid that it is, as people say, rather too big a 
contract." He thereupon drew up a brief amend- 
ment, to be " Article Fourteen of the Constitution," 
which provided that, in case the suffrage were re- 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 341 

duced by any State, the basis of representation 
should be correspondingly reduced, and that no 
debts should ever be paid that had been incurred 
in behalf of the rebellion; and he proposed that 
the ratification of this amendment should be made 
a condition of reconstruction. Congress finally 
adopted these two clauses substantially as Chase 
wrote them ; but it adhered to its own clauses as- 
serting the citizenship and civil rights of the negroes 
and granting Congress the power to enforce them ; 
that is, it put the Civil Eights Act into the Con- 
stitution. To Chase's mind these additional propo- 
sitions were inexpedient, because, as he said, " it 
seems to me that nothing is gained sufficiently im- 
portant, and unattainable by legislation, to warrant 
our friends in overloading the ship with amend- 
ment freight." Nevertheless, he later applied the 
amendment in its most sweeping form in his dis- 
sent from the decision of the Supreme Court in the 
Slaughter-house Cases, 

The continued holding of troops in the South 
had caused several vexed questions as to the rela- 
tions between civil and military authority ; hence, 
on April 2, 1866, Johnson issued a proclamation 
announcing that the war had ceased in ten of the 
seceded States, and on August 30, another procla- 
mation setting forth that it had ceased also in 
Texas. The process of reconstruction was, how- 
ever, delayed until the next year, when the elabo- 
rate statutes of March 2 and March 23, 1867, 
established the legal basis of reconstruction, and 







342 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

also prescribed the conditions of the reentrance of 
the States into the Union. The existing state 
governments were declared to be provisional, and 
no State was to be received back until it had es- 
tablished negro suffrage ; in order to have assur- 
ance that the States should actually fulfill these 
conditions, they were for the time being put into 
the hands of military commanders. 

Down to the end of 1866, as we have seen, 
Chase's connection with reconstruction was that of 
a statesman and not that of a judge. The strife 
between President and Congress had, however, an 
indirect influence on the Supreme Court. There 
was an apprehension that the court would take 
sides ; and hence when Justice Catron died in May, 
1865, and President Johnson nominated as his suc- 
cessor his Attorney-General, Mr. Stanbery, the Sen- 
ate declined to confirm the nomination. The fed- 
eral courts were just then distressed by the serious 
crowding of the circuits, and nearly all the justices 
favored a pending bill for reorganization by add- 
ing new circuit judges. Upon this bill was tacked 
a provision to reduce the number of associates to 
eight, which of course took away the necessity for 
an immediate appointment by Johnson. The Sen- 
ate went even farther by an amendment through 
which, as vacancies should occur, the number of 
associates was to be reduced to six ; the purpose 
was to put it out of the power of the President, 
during his whole term, to appoint any justices who 
might be favorable to his side of the controversy. 



PROBLEM OP RECONSTRUCTION 343 

On this proposition Johnson did not choose to take 
issue, and it became law July 29, 1866. 

About the same time the long-suspended federal 
courts began to resume their sittings in the South- 
ern States. During 1866 the federal district 
judges, Underwood and Brooks of Virginia, Hill 
of Mississippi, and Bristeed of Alabama, all under- 
took to hold courts. As successor to Taney, Chase's 
circuit included Maryland, Virginia, and North 
Carolina ; but even after the President's proclama- 
tions declaring the Civil War at an end, he stead- 
fastly refused to hold any court in Virginia or 
North Carolina " until all possibility of claim that 
the judicial is subordinate to the military power is 
removed by express declaration by the President." 

Chase's attitude was practically an opinion that 
the military governments established by the Presi- 
dent were abnormal; and also an indirect asser- 
tion of the supremacy of ordinary tribunals in time 
of peace; and it reinforced the decision of the 
Supreme Court in the Vallandigham Case of 1864. 
But in the other Southern circuits decisions were 
made, and soon after appeals began to be taken to 
the Supreme Court. Under the judiciary act of 
1866, the Supreme Court justices had no circuit 
jurisdiction in the South ; but in March, 1867, that 
jurisdiction was restored, and Chase soon after 
assumed his functions at Raleigh, and delivered an 
opinion on June 16, 1867. The service of process 
under his decisions was resisted by the military 
authority, acting under orders from General Sickles, 



344 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the commander of the department. Chase was 
willing to force the issue by direct prosecution of 
the military officer concerned ; but the President 
speedily removed Sickles, and appointed a succes- 
sor with instructions not to interfere with the pro- 
cesses of the court: and the jurisdiction of the 
federal courts within the States lately in rebellion 
was not again brought into question. 

While the contest between Johnson and Con- 
gress was reaching its height, during 1866 and 
1867, the Supreme Court at last began to prove its 
vitality in a series of decisions which involved 
questions arising out of the Civil "War. Within 
four months six cases were decided, in four of 
which the court took jurisdiction, and stood forth 
once more as an arbiter between the States and the 
nation, if not between the other two departments 
of the federal government. The first of these 
cases, Ex parte Milligan, in the term of Decem- 
ber, 1866, gave the desired opportunity to reassert 
the right of the court to be the expounder of the 
Constitution, for it traversed the authority of the 
unpopular military commissions at a time when 
their necessity was past. L. P. Milligan was ar- 
rested in Indiana in October, 1864, under color of 
the act of March 3, 1863, authorizing the suspen- 
sion of habeas corpus, an act which had already 
been held void by the Supreme Court in the case 
of Gerder v. the U. S. (1864-65) so far as ap- 
peals from the Court of Claims were concerned. 
He was duly tried by a military commission, and 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 345 

sentenced to be hanged. Lincoln approved the 
finding, but execution was delayed, and hostilities 
soon after ceased. In May, 1865, Milligan ap- 
pealed to the Circuit Court for a writ of habeas 
corpus^ which would raise the question of jurisdic- 
tion. The circuit judges disagreed and referred 
the case to the Supreme Court ; but the case was 
long held under advisement, and the decision was 
not announced till December, 1866. The fact that 
James A. Garfield took up Milligan's cause with 
spirit and force, and argued the case as his counsel 
before the Supreme Court, was a sufficient proof 
that the whole system of military courts was un- 
popular ; and the behavior of the commission ap- 
pointed to try Lincoln's murderers in May, 1865, 
had not increased public confidence in that arbi- 
trary kind of justice. 

In the decision of the appeal by the Supreme 
Court, all the nine justices agreed that the com- 
mission which had tried Milligan had no jurisdic- 
tion under the terms of the statute, and therefore 
ordered him to be discharged and the proceedings 
of the military court to be nullified. But a fun- 
damental and nearly evenly balanced difference of 
opinion was revealed on an important principle; 
for five judges held that Congress could not au- 
thorize such tribunals in regions where the civil 
courts were open, while Chase and three of his fel- 
lows held the contrary. Though Chase at that 
time gave no evidence of a desire that the court 
exercise restraint over the legislative power of Con- 



346 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

gress, the decision was everywhere accepted as the 
triumph of the civil over the military power, even 
during war. The reign of military law within the 
Northern States was at last over. 

This famous decision has so long been recognized 
as a public service that it is difficult to realize the 
storm of unpopularity which fell upon the court. 
According to the New York " Independent," the 
decision restored the court " to the proud eminence 
it occupied when Taney directed its decrees." The 
"National Anti-Slavery Standard" declared that 
" an alliance, offensive and defensive, has at length 
been favorably concluded between the Supreme 
Court and the President ; " and Wendell Phillips 
proposed that the court be abolished out of hand, 
for " the nation must be saved, no matter what or 
how venerable the foe whose existence goes down 
before that necessity." 

A few days later, January 14, 1867, the court 
held void a clause of a state constitution, in the 
so-called " Test oath " cases ( Gumming s v. Mis- 
souri and In re Garland), Arguments had been 
heard many months earlier, and Chase appears to 
have interested himself in postponing the decision 
for the time being. Nevertheless, somehow John- 
son learned or supposed that the court had come 
to a decision against the validity of the oaths, for 
he publicly stated in the campaign of 1866 that 
his own opinion on that subject had their concur- 
rence. 

The point in the Gumming s Gase was the validity 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 347 

of a retrospective oath of loyalty imposed by the 
radical Missouri Constitution of 1864, under which 
any person, who had " by act or word " manifested 
sympathy with those engaged in rebellion, was dis- 
franchised and excluded from public office, from 
office in any corporation, and from the practice of 
any profession. This enactment was applied to 
Cummings to prevent him from officiating as a 
Catholic priest. It was defended as the act of a 
State possessing "attributes of sovereignty," and 
it was a problem to find constitutional limitations 
which would annul this disagreeable clause in the 
Missouri Constitution, and yet leave no loophole of 
escape from the philanthropic articles of the con- 
stitutions of the reconstructed States. Five judges, 
the bare majority of the court, found the desired 
limitations in the constitutional prohibitions of ex 
post facto laws and bills of attainder. From this 
conclusion Chase dissented, together with Swayne, 
Miller, and Davis, all four appointees of Lincoln ; 
their ground was mainly that the ex post facto 
clause applied only to criminal cases and not to 
civil disabilities. 

The Garland Case turned on the validity of an 
act of Congress of January 14, 1865, which im- 
posed a test oath for attorneys before the Supreme 
Court. Garland had been admitted as a coun- 
selor before the war, but now found himself ex- 
cluded, although he had fortified himself with a 
pardon from the President. The majority of the 
court held that it was not in the power of Congress 



348 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

to stretch its power of prescribing qualifications 
for attorneys so as to make it " a means for the 
infliction of punishment, against the prohibition of 
the Constitution," or "to inflict punishment be- 
yond the reach of executive clemency." Again 
Chase and his three fellows dissented, partly on 
legal grounds, and partly from the political reason 
that "to suffer treasonable sentiments to spread 
here unchecked is to permit the stream on which 
the life of the nation depends to be poisoned at its 
source." They held also that the President's par- 
don could not relieve from a qualification, though 
it might from a punishment. 

The significance of these cases is not only that 
all the older judges united in annulling, on narrow 
and technical grounds, provisions of a state Con- 
stitution and of a federal statute, but also that the 
decision suggested to Congress what might be ex- 
pected when the pending reconstruction acts came 
up for judicial examination. Within a few weeks 
efforts were made to stop the execution of those 
acts, which had passed Congress by two-thirds 
majorities, in the face of hostile veto messages, in 
which Johnson had freely declared them unconsti- 
tutional. The statutes by which existing state 
governments were placed under military control 
were assailed by Governor Humphrey of Mississippi, 
who through his attorney, Kobert J. Walker, asked 
for an injunction to restrain President Johnson 
from carrying out the statutes in Mississippi ; by 
this proceeding troublesome preliminaries of cases 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 349 

brought slowly from the lower courts might be 
avoided, and a decision might almost be forced 
from the Supreme Court. The petitioner argued 
that no penalties or disabilities could be laid upon 
the State as such, but only upon individuals who 
might have violated the laws of the United States ; 
and he thus brought up the whole question of the 
status of the seceded States. The President had 
no wish to raise a contest on that issue, and there- 
fore the Attorney-General objected to the injunc- 
tion ; indeed, the case was without precedent, since 
this was the first attempt in the history of the court 
to make the President party of record to a suit 
before the Supreme Court. The brief decision 
rendered April 15, 1867, took the sagacious ground 
that the duties imposed by the act were " purely 
executive and political;" and, without a dissent, 
the court declined to assume jurisdiction, and left 
the President and Congress to settle their own 
differences. 

Another suit was pending, however, in which 
the authorities of the State of Georgia asked for 
an injunction, not against the President, but against 
the Secretary of War, and for this form of action 
there were precedents. President Johnson had his 
own reasons for unwillingness to protect Stanton, 
and interposed no objection. The court, therefore, 
gave renewed consideration to the issue, but ad- 
hered to the principle of the first case. Notwith- 
standing the excitement of the secretary, and the 
widespread belief that the remedy sought would be 



350 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

granted by a majority of five to four as in the Mil- 
ligan case, the case was dismissed on May 15, 1867, 
upon the ground that it was a political question 
which could not be settled by a court. Some 
thoughtful men, who had expected to see a check 
applied to the rising power of Congress, exclaimed 
in despair that " no State in the Union could rely 
upon the protection of the Supreme Court." 

The end had not yet been reached ; another case 
was now presented, in which the parties were not 
executives of State or nation, in which the point 
involved was supposed to be the same as that in 
the Milligan case, and yet which brought up the 
validity of the reconstruction acts. Colonel Mc- 
Cardle, the editor of a Vicksburg paper, was 
brought by the military commander of the district 
before a military commission on the charge of pub- 
lishing insurrectionary articles. Application was 
made to Judge Hill of the United States Circuit 
Court to grant a writ of habeas corpus, by which 
the authority of this extra-judicial tribunal might 
be tested. Hill asserted the constitutionality of 
the commission, but appeal was taken to the Su- 
preme Court, and speedily argued before it. In 
December, 1867, that body, in preliminary pro- 
ceedings, asserted its jurisdiction, but argument on 
the principle involved was postponed till the next 
term. The question was now distinctly presented 
of the power to pass statutes authorizing trials by 
military commissions after the official announce- 
ment that no war was going on ; and no one could 
predict the decision. 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 351 

Until after the impeachment of Johnson in 
1868, the court made no more great constitutional 
decisions; it never had to decide a fundamental 
case of freedom under the Emancipation Procla- 
mation, or even under the Thirteenth Amendment ; 
and none of the legal questions of treason reached 
it. But to Chase, as judge in a Southern circuit, 
came the opportunity by a judicial decree to strike 
the bonds from a large number of helpless Afri- 
cans. At the time of the abolition of slavery in 
Maryland, in 1864, Elizabeth Turner was immedi- 
ately bound as apprentice to her former master. 
This indenture, servile in terms, and forced on a 
defenseless child, Chase had the satisfaction to de- 
clare void, on two grounds : because it established 
a modified form of slavery, contrary to the Thir- 
teenth Amendment ; and also because it violated 
the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which assured equal 
legal privileges to negroes and whites. The ap- 
prentice decision attracted wide discussion, and 
General Howard reported that it brought about 
the release of a large number of children held 
in virtual slavery. It was also a notice to the 
Southern States that their offensive vagrant laws 
of 1865 and 1866 would not stand before the fed- 
eral courts. 

The fact that Chase's circuit included the former 
seat of the Confederate government brought within 
his jurisdiction the prosecutions for treason against 
former officials of that government. At the end 
of the war, under Stanton's authority, writs were 



352 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

issued for the arrest of the principal military and 
civil leaders, including both Lee and Davis ; and 
though General Grant interfered effectively to pre- 
vent the arrest of the military commanders, Jeffer- 
son Davis was confined in Fortress Monroe from 
1865 to 1867, and remained under indictment till 
1869. If the war was to be followed by criminal 
trials for treason, a clearer case than his could not 
be made out, and President Johnson was at first anx- 
ious that Davis be put on his trial ; so that Chase 
seemed likely to have an opportunity to expound 
the law of treason, such as Marshall had in the 
Butt Case. 

From the first, Chase disliked the prospect : that 
Davis's acts were treasonable he never doubted, and 
he must have so ruled had there ever been a trial ; 
but he thought that a military commission was the 
suitable tribunal ; and by 1867 he was out of har- 
mony with Johnson, whose Attorney-General must 
direct the preliminaries of a prosecution. So long, 
therefore, as military rule continued in the South, 
Chase declined to hold any court for the trial of 
Davis on indictments found in Virginia. Another 
indictment found in the District of Columbia was 
inadequate ; and the trial hung fire, even after the 
President's proclamation of 1866, declaring the 
war at an end, and notwithstanding resolutions in 
Congress demanding prosecution. In May, 1867, 
the President definitely threw the responsibility on 
the judiciary, by allowing the military custodian to 
surrender Davis to the custody of the federal court 






PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 353 

under a habeas corpus issued by Chase. At last 
there seemed a prospect of a trial ; but when Davis 
appeared in court for the first time, Chase refused 
to sit, and Davis was admitted to bail by Judge 
Underwood. 

By this time it was plain that the chief justice 
had no heart in the prosecution, that the adminis- 
istration would not urge it, and that Northern 
men saw no advantage in making a martyr of the 
President of the Confederacy. The trial was, by 
agreement, postponed from term to term, till No- 
vember, 1868. Then for the first time Chase sat 
as judge in the court ; but Davis's counsel set up 
the plea that their client was one of those included 
in the Fourteenth Amendment (which had just 
gone into effect), and that the penalties there enu- 
merated took the place of any previously incurred 
penalties for treason. The plea seems far-fetched, 
but Chase approved it. The regular circuit judge, 
probably by arrangement, took the other side, and 
the court certified its divergence up to the Su- 
preme Court for settlement there. A few days later, 
however, December 25, 1868, President Johnson 
issued a proclamation of general amnesty, and at 
the next term the circuit judge discharged Davis 
on the ground that he was included in that pardon. 
The Supreme Court did not interfere, and thus 
ended the great treason case, with no trial on its 
merits. 

Though fiercely assailed at the time for his 
lukewarmness, and though accused of favoring 



354 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Davis as a means of making friends with the 
Southern Democrats, Chase performed a public 
service by delaying a trial ; the release of Davis 
made the Confederate leader harmless, and he could 
never have been convicted in Virginia without pack- 
ing the jury. By this time all the country was ad- 
justed to the principle of the reconstruction acts, — 
that the South was to be punished by penalties on 
tlie States as communities, and not by executing in- 
dividuals "pour encourager les autres." 

The year 1867 was not a favorable time for the 
Supreme Court to emphasize its authority to re- 
view acts of Congress. The two-thirds majority 
of that body relentlessly overrode the President's 
vetoes, and was in no temper to be restrained by 
a court. It was remembered that in 1802 Congress 
had disposed of a hostile judiciary by a statute dis- 
solving some of the courts, and thus depriving the 
judges of their places; and that the whole ma- 
chinery of appeals was fixed by revocable acts of 
Congress. Suggestions were promptly made in 
Congress that unfavorable decisions by the Su- 
preme Court might be prevented by resolute legis- 
lation, and members complained that the judges 
were "too apt to turn their attention back in 
search of some stale precedent of the dark ages." 
It was supposed that Justice Wayne of Georgia 
was arbiter between two factions of four judges 
each, and that his sympathies were with the presi- 
dential policy ; still he had shown remarkable im- 
partiality during the Civil War, and but for his 



PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 355 

death in 1867 he would probably have backed up 
the congressional theory. 

When Congress assembled in December, 1867, 
one of the first questions to come before it was 
that of the Supreme Court. An early bill pro- 
posed that two thirds of the entire court must con- 
cur in deciding adversely on the constitutionality 
of any law of the United States ; another plan 
required unanimous agreement in such cases. Al- 
though men like Sumner supported this extrava- 
gant proposition, it finally gave way to a bill taking 
away part of the appellate jurisdiction, the purpose 
being to prevent the further consideration of the 
McCardle case. Schenck of Ohio supported the 
measure, because, as he said, " I have lost confi- 
dence in the majority of the Supreme Court. I 
believe that they usurp power whenever they dare 
to undertake to settle questions purely political. ,, 
It passed both Houses, and though the President at 
once interposed his veto, in March, 1868, it was 
carried over his head. When at the next term of 
the court, McCardle' s case came up, the court 
wisely held that its jurisdiction had been removed : 
as Chase expressed it in his opinion, " Judicial duty 
is not less fully performed by declining ungranted 
jurisdiction than by exercising firmly that which 
the Constitution and the laws conferred." 

Notwithstanding the panic in Congress, there 
seems little reason to suppose that the court would 
have thrown the process of reconstruction into con- 
fusion by holding the main acts unconstitutional. 



356 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

It is alleged that Justice Field told his friends that 
in the court's opinion the acts were unconstitu- 
tional ; if it were so, Chase took care that no such 
opinion should be pronounced. On August 7, 1867, 
he wrote to General Garfield : " The country is well 
satisfied with the action of Congress, not, I think, 
that the people want a continuance of military au- 
thority, but because they want restoration on solid 
and just foundation as soon as possible — the Presi- 
dent must yield to the People ; or the People will 
take up and put through impeachment." 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE SECOND STAGE OE RECONSTRUCTION 

Throughout the first stage of reconstruction, 
Chase's attitude had been dignified and his influ- 
ence conservative and conciliatory: he had done 
his best to restrain Johnson from excess ; he had 
as circuit judge, and as judge in the Supreme 
Court, thrown his influence against technical deci- 
sions ; he had allowed the method of congressional 
reconstruction to go on untroubled to the end. 
The Southern States duly paid the price of their 
readmission by ratifying the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, and from 1868 they were gradually allowed 
to reoccupy seats in Congress. But the struggle 
between the President and Congress had grown so 
bitter that it was determined to remove Johnson 
from his office, though his term had but a few 
months longer to run, and though there was not 
the slightest danger of his reelection. His vio- 
lence, even when he was in the right, had weak- 
ened him beyond any power of harm, and the 
relentless two-thirds majority in Congress could 
override him at will; impeachment was unneces- 
sary, and therefore tactless. The issue finally 
selected was that he should be impeached for a 



358 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

violation of the Tenure of Office Act, passed to 
curb him in March, 1867. In August, 1867, John- 
son removed Secretary Stanton, and designated 
General Grant as secretary ad interim. When 
at the next session of Congress in December, 
1867, the Senate refused to assent to the removal, 
Stanton, according to the terms of the statute, was 
restored to his office ; but Johnson refused to ac- 
knowledge him, and took some steps to make up 
a test case for the Supreme Court. Within two 
days a resolution of impeachment passed the 
House, and in March, 1868, the Senate began to 
sit as a court of impeachment. 

For the first time in the nation's history had 
come about the impeachment of a president, a 
proceeding in which the Constitution designates 
the chief justice to preside over the Senate. Not- 
withstanding his judicial office and his special 
function as presiding officer, Chase did not conceal 
his strong opinion that the trial was impolitic and 
unjust. Although his friend Ashley had been the 
first to urge impeachment, Chase could not share 
in the violent antipathies of Congress ; for his 
personal relations with Johnson had not been un- 
friendly, and he could see clearly the danger of the 
supremacy of Congress if it succeeded in remov- 
ing a President. Nor is it likely that he looked 
forward with pleasure to the prospects of his old 
rival, Benjamin F. Wade, then president of the 
Senate, and hence next in succession to the vice- 
president. A few days after the end of the trial, 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 359 

he expressed in a letter to Greeley sentiments 
which had been sufficiently evident throughout the 
proceedings : "I was against impeachment as a 
policy — so were you ; my strong impressions were 
against the sufficiency of the article and the proof 
to warrant conviction and these impressions have 
gradually ripened into beliefs." 

From the first, the Senate felt uneasy at his par- 
ticipation, and, before organizing under his presi- 
dency, drew up a set of rules to govern the trial. 
When, on March 6, Chase was notified to attend, 
he properly protested against any official action of 
the Senate upon the impeachment without his pre- 
sence ; and he insisted that the rules should be 
adopted by the Senate as a court, before going 
farther. As soon as the trial had fairly begun, it 
became evident that it was the intention of the 
leaders to deny the chief justice any real part in 
the proceedings ; they therefore maintained that 
the Senate did not sit as a court, and hence was 
not bound by legal procedure and principles of 
evidence. Against this assertion Chase set him- 
self with effect ; and he successfully used his right 
to act, not simply as a moderator, but as the pre- 
siding judge in the tribunal. When the question 
of the admissibility of evidence came up, he de- 
cided upon his own motion, subject to the revision 
of the Senate if a vote were demanded ; and the 
Senate did not know how to avoid his action. An 
understanding had been reached among the radical 
Republicans that, on the first attempt of Chase to 



360 SALMON POKTLAND CHASE 

vote upon a tie, a rule should be passed against 
him ; but the first tie arose unexpectedly on a 
question of the retirement of the Senate for con- 
sultation, and instantly Chase added his vote in 
favor of adjournmeDt, and declared the session 
closed. 

From this time it was evident that Chase could 
not be set aside. His moderating influence aroused 
the wrath of Thaddeus Stevens, who said in the 
course of the trial : " It is the meanest case, be- 
fore the meanest tribunal, and on the meanest sub- 
ject of human history." Party feeling ran high. 
It was known that some of the Republican sena- 
tors would not support the impeachment, and 
Chase drew upon himself the anger of the disap- 
pointed radicals. He was even accused, notwith- 
standing his positive denial, of personally solicit- 
ing votes for acquittal. On the contrary, he failed 
to gauge the play of feeling, and was surprised, on 
the test vote of May 16, to see that seven Repub- 
lican senators voted for acquittal, and that the op- 
ponents of Johnson thus lacked one vote of the 
necessary two thirds. At no time in his life did 
he show more calmness, good judgment, and fore- 
sight than in the impeachment trial ; and for his 
effort to raise the proceedings above a partisan in- 
vestigation, and to hold them to their proper char- 
acter of a judicial process, he deserves the credit 
of averting a great public danger. Though he 
had no vote, and little opportunity for direct inter- 
ference, the weight of his character, his reputation 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 361 

as an anti-slavery man, and his great office were 
thrown into the conservative side of the nearly 
evenly balanced scale. 

It was unfortunate for Chase, that, even while 
the trial was going on, he permitted his friends 
again to urge him for the presidency. In his 
service as chief justice he had an excellent oppor- 
tunity to show his powers as a constitutional law- 
yer; and the decisions of the court during that 
period, on both public and private law, were not 
inferior to those of the previous decade. Had he 
withdrawn altogether from political strife, his 
motives on the bench would have been unassail- 
able ; but from the moment he sought the presi- 
dency he could not escape the suspicion that his 
decisions had been influenced by his conception of 
their effect upon his political chances. 

In the four years of his chief-justiceship, Chase 
had never lost sight of the Eepublican nomination 
of 1868. One reason was, that he did not feel an 
absorbing interest in the work of a judge. " The 
office is dignified," said he in 1868 ; " I enjoy 
many things in the work, but I confess that my 
own mind is executive rather than judicial. I 
should prefer to conduct affairs in the way that 
seems to me wisest, rather than to decide on mat- 
ters that are past ; " and very soon after his induc- 
tion he wrote : " Working from morning till mid- 
night, and no result, except that John Smith owned 
this parcel of land or other property instead of 
Jacob Eobinson ; I caring nothing, and nobody 



362 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

caring much more, about the matter." For several 
years it seemed doubtful whether the Supreme 
Court under Chase would recover its great po- 
sition as a national arbiter; while the opportuni- 
ties for distinction to a vigorous and commanding 
President were never more alluring. 

To blame Chase for desiring to be President is 
to blame him for being what he was : conscious of 
his own great abilities, he felt that he had never 
had a full opportunity to show his powers ; and he 
was extremely sensitive to the opinion of those 
about him, and desired the highest approval that 
could be given. He would have been a greater 
judge and a happier man without this unsatisfied 
ambition ; he would have left a greater reputation 
had he set Marshall before his mind as a model 
rather than Washington; and all our national 
experience had shown how unsettling to the man 
and to the court is the ambition of a judge for po- 
litical office. But Chase was a great man who had 
played a great part, and the quality of his ambi- 
tion can only be settled by an ethical inquiry into 
his motives. As one of the founders of the Repub- 
lican party, which, in his own judgment, owed him 
loyal support, Chase felt that he was the legiti- 
mate candidate for its nomination in 1868 ; and 
no other civilian of equal abilities and reputa- 
tion was suggested. Seward had lost reputation 
in the cabinets of both Lincoln and Johnson, and 
none of the senators stood forth preeminent. By 
1867, however, it became evident that the party 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 363 

might look for a military candidate, and against 
such a nomination Chase threw himself with all 
his strength, not only because he desired to be Pre- 
sident, but because he felt the danger of electing 
military heroes. 

He did not hesitate to put himself forward in 
the presidential struggle, and to follow the same 
methods as in the three previous preliminary cam- 
paigns. In 1866 his supporters began to suggest 
to him that the time had come to organize, and in 
June and July, 1867, he sent a confidential friend 
to sound the Republicans in the West ; he was 
pleased to be told that Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, 
and Missouri could be counted for him, and that 
there was a strong feeling against Grant, who 
loomed up as the probable military candidate. 
But, just as in 1856, 1860, and 1864, Chase was 
compelled to face the fact that he roused no enthu- 
siasm among the people, and that he had no strong 
friends among the leading politicians or public men 
who would or could prepare the way for him. Dur- 
ing 1867 and early 1868 the current ran against 
him, and in March, 1868, at about the beginning 
of the impeachment trial, he threw up the contest, 
and assumed " only the interest of a citizen who 
loves his country, and desires earnestly the speedi- 
est possible restoration." It had by this time 
become evident, not only that General Grant 
would be nominated by the Eepublicans, but that 
he must be so nominated unless they were willing 
that he should be the candidate of the Democrats. 



364 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

After the persistent efforts to make Chase the 
Republican nominee, it seemed to many of his 
friends almost treasonable that within a few weeks 
he should be seeking the Democratic nomination. 
Nothing in Chase's life has caused such fierce crit- 
icism, and nothing has done so much to diminish 
a well-earned reputation for sagacity, patriotism, 
and consistency, as his desire for that nomination. 
But, however faulty Chase's judgment, and however 
lame his logic, his course is not indefensible. His 
own explanation was loss of confidence in his old 
party. " I cannot approve in general," he wrote in 
September, 1868, "of what the Republican party 
has done. ... I hold my old faith in universal suf- 
frage, in reconstruction upon that basis, in univer- 
sal amnesty, and in inviolate public faith ; but I do 
not believe in military government for American 
States, nor in military commissions for the trial of 
American citizens, nor in the subversion of the 
executive and judicial departments of the general 
government by Congress, no matter how patriotic 
the motive may be." To be sure, he had just 
eagerly sought the support of this faulty organiza- 
tion; but Chase always overestimated the influ- 
ence which he might have as President in directing 
and moderating his party, and his indictment of 
Congress was justified by the intention of the lead- 
ers to make that body supreme over both Presi- 
dent and Supreme Court. 

Neither the question of the form of government, 
nor even the question of the reconstruction of the 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 365 

States, was the issue in 1868. In Congress, in- 
terest had been transferred from the disabilities of 
the Southern whites to the possibilities of govern- 
ment under negro suffrage; and the Republican 
party, with Chase as one of its leaders, stood in 
the public eye as the defenders of the freedom, the 
equal rights, and the political privileges of the 
negroes. How could he put himself into relations 
with a party whose traditional tenets were against 
negro equality in any form? The chief justice 
found himself denounced in savage terms by his 
old anti-slavery associates for one moment trusting 
Democrats to do justice to the negro. In his 
mind, however, had always lain the belief that the 
Democratic party had by nature anti-slavery prin- 
ciples. Now in 1868 the Democrats in the North 
were humbled and discouraged, and the Democrats 
of the South were disfranchised or reduced to im- 
potence. Some of the shrewdest leaders, among 
them Samuel J. Tilden, favored a new departure, 
in which the party should accept the results of the 
war, including the new conditions of the South, 
as accomplished facts, and should make a stand 
against the threatened concentration of govern- 
ment in Washington. This was good fighting- 
ground, and it was upon this basis that overtures 
were made to Chase to consider the Democratic 
nomination. The phrase by which he described 
the new policy was "universal amnesty and uni- 
versal suffrage," which meant that the Southern 
white voters were to be restored, but that the 



366 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

negroes should maintain their suffrage side by side 
with them. 

The difficulty with this whole suggestion lay in 
the obvious fact that negro suffrage, honestly ad- 
ministered, meant that the Southern Democrats 
should be placed in a permanent minority in most 
of the Southern States, — and without Southern 
electoral votes it was folly to think of electing a 
Democratic President. The strength of the propo- 
sition was in the hope that a candidate like Chase 
would draw into coalition with the Democrats such 
Republicans as were alarmed at the radicalism of 
Congress and at the militarism of the Republican 
candidate. In April, 1868, while the impeach- 
ment trial was still pending, Chase indicated his 
willingness to accept the Democratic nomination, 
and on May 5, before a final vote by the Senate, 
he wrote, speaking of earlier years: "I was a 
Democrat then, too democratic for the Democratic 
party of those days ; for I admitted no exception, 
on ground of race or color or condition, to the 
impartial application of Democratic principles to 
all measures and to all men. Such a Democrat I 
am to-day." 

To many of the Democratic leaders he seemed 
an opportune candidate, and the chieftains at- 
tempted to find some common ground upon which 
their followers might stand with him. A letter of 
May 30 to August Belmont contains a candid 
statement of Chase's position ; he held to his con- 
viction of many years that negro suffrage was a 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 367 

necessary condition in the future South, adding: 
" I would eradicate if possible every root of bitter- 
ness. I want to see the Union and the Constitution 
established in the affections of all the people, and 
I think that the initiative should be taken by the 
successful side in the late struggle. I have been 
and am in favor of so much of the policy of Con- 
gress as bases the reorganization of the State gov- 
ernments in the South upon universal suffrage." 

For some days before the New York Convention 
of July, 1868, Chase's nomination seemed likely ; 
the strongest regular Democratic candidate, Pen- 
dleton, was found not to control two thirds of the 
convention, and Horatio Seymour absolutely de- 
clined to be considered as a candidate. A provi- 
sional platform was drawn up and submitted to 
Chase, who gave his assent and wrote numerous 
letters for publication, defining his ground and 
pledging himself to withdraw the troops from the 
Southern States. To John Van Buren, son of the 
late President, who acted as his representative, he 
took pains to write privately: "I must not be 
understood as expressing any opinion on questions 
of constitutional law which may come before the 
court." 

As the date of the convention, July #, drew 
near, negotiations grew closer; unfortunately for 
Chase most of his old and tried friends had no 
place in a Democratic convention ; but Vallandig- 
ham of Ohio and other ultra-Democrats favored 
his nomination, and a majority of the New York 



/ 



368 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

delegation had agreed to bring him forward. As 
the voting proceeded in the convention on July 9, 
it was clearly seen that Pendleton could not be 
nominated, and the moment was approaching when 
the name of the chief justice was to be brought 
before the assembly. Seymour, the president of 
the convention, had been most earnest in Chase's 
behalf, and expected the nomination of the chief 
justice; but when Pendleton's Ohio leader, Gen- 
eral McCook, saw that his favorite could not be 
chosen, he nominated Seymour, and despite the 
latter's protestations the nomination was carried 
with an uproar, Chase's name having barely been 
mentioned before the convention. 
^ Never in his whole life had Chase come so near 
to the first step on the way to the presidency. 
The wrath and indignation of his immediate friends 
are reflected in a letter from one of his family, who 
was on the ground : " You have been most cruelly 
deceived and shamefully used by the man whom 
you trusted implicitly, and the Country must suffer 
for his duplicity. . . . Mr. Tilden and Mr. Seymour 
have done this work, and Mr. Van Buren has been 
their tool" The real reason why Chase was not 
nominated was undoubtedly that put into an apo- 
thegm by a friend : " Mr. Chase was willing to 
swallow the Democracy, but not to be swallowed by 
the Democracy." The principle of negro suffrage, 
to which he had adhered, and must as an honest 
man adhere, was too much for the convention, and 
would have been too much for the voters. The dis- 



/ 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 369 

astrous effect of such a nomination was sufficiently 
shown in 1872 in the fate of Horace Greeley ; and 
Chase simply escaped a crushing overthrow when 
the convention refused to put him in nomination. 

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson marked 
the high tide of national feeling as well as of con- 
gressional supremacy in reconstruction matters ; 
and when General Grant became President, in 
March, 1869, there were already evidences of re- 
action. Notwithstanding the "carpet-bag" gov- 
ernments in the South, the Republican majority 
in the lower house of Congress was reduced, and 
the Supreme Court seemed to feel free to decide 
an accumulation of cases involving the details of 
reconstruction, and eventually touching the effect 
of the Fourteenth Amendment. As before, Chase 
assumed the double function of a public man of 
large experience and influence who desired to see 
what he believed to be the principles of the Civil 
War carried out in legislation, and of the head of 
the court which had the responsibility of applying 
that legislation. 

This double attitude was a part of Chase's na- 
ture. Quite apart from his ambition to be Presi- 
dent, he could not stand aloof from the public 
movement of reconstruction; hence in 1869 and 
1870 he took a large part in defending negro suf- 
frage. The radical Republican leaders desired it 
even more than he did, though for other reasons. 
Indeed, in 1869 suffrage had been given to the 
negroes in every Southern State, as a condition of 



370 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

reconstruction ; but it was easy to foresee that as 
soon as the States were left to themselves some of 
them would surely take away the ballot, with the 
result of an immediate loss of Republican control. 
The radical Republican leaders looked on negro 
suffrage as the basis of their electoral and con- 
gressional votes in the South : to passionate ^con- 
structionists, like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus 
Stevens, negro suffrage meant a final triumph over 
the hated rebel ; to Chase it seemed the means not 
only of protecting but of ennobling the negro. He 
championed it earlier than any other public man ; 
from 1862 he urged it in season and out of season ; 
he pleaded for it in the cabinet ; and he separated 
from Lincoln's plan of reconstruction principally 
because that plan was based on white government. 
With Sumner he waited on Johnson, immediately 
on his becoming President, to urge negro suffrage ; 
and the occasion of his opposition to Johnson's 
reconstruction policy was the President's failure to 
follow those good counsels. As time went on, the 
suffrage occupied more and more of his thoughts ; 
he felt sure that Congress would have made easier 
terms for the Southern States if the South had 
voluntarily enfranchised the negroes ; he was con- 
vinced that universal suffrage was everywhere the 
only safe basis for popular government; and he 
thought that it was especially necessary in the 
South, in order to quiet the terrors of the negroes 
and to bring them back into harmonious relations 
with their former masters. Indeed, it is probable 






SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 371 

that for their own purposes the Southern leaders 
would have done better to accept negro suffrage, 
and then to organize and influence the negro vote 
themselves. To secure this blessing, Chase was 
willing and anxious to have " universal amnesty," 
that is, the restoration of nearly all the whites to 
their public rights. In a letter of May 29, 1869, 
he says : " I have lived to see all men free in 
America; I have lived to see one currency pro- 
vided for the people. I hope to live to see univer- 
sal freedom grounded on universal suffrage, and a 
national currency perfected into equality with gold. 
These things are only foundations ; future genera- 
tions must build on them." 

Nevertheless, he hesitated when, in 1869, the 
Fifteenth Amendment was introduced, putting the 
suffrage into irrepealable form. On April 3, 1869, 
he wrote to a friend : " After the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment was adopted, I thought the suffrage should 
be left to the States after restoration, and I still 
think so. Centralization and consolidation have 
gone far enough and too far. And yet, inasmuch 
as the proposed Fifteenth Amendment does not 
prevent the States from imposing suitable qualifi- 
cations, if qualifications should be found necessary, 
I incline to wish that it may be ratified. I should 
have no reservation in that wish if the clause giv- 
ing Congress power to legislate were left out. I 
want as little legislation by Congress in respect to 
the internal concerns of the States as possible." 
Once decided, however, he supported the amend- 



372 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ment heartily, and his influence was strong if not 
decisive in the Ohio legislature in securing the 
ratification by that State, and thus completing 
the three-fourths majority necessary to make the 
amendment part of the Constitution. When it 
was duly proclaimed, November 30, 1870, Chase 
felt that the structure was now complete, and he 
wrote : " No man can now be found who will re- 
store slavery; a few years hence, if the colored 
men are wise, it will be impossible to find a man 
who will avow himself in favor of denying or 
abridging their right to vote." 

Chase's remark about centralization is a key to 
his general attitude in the court from this time on. 
It must be remembered that all his life long he had 
been accustomed to look upon the States as but- 
tressed in impregnable rights. He had always 
acknowledged the privilege of the States to estab- 
lish slavery if they chose, and for that very reason 
had been determined that express constitutional 
amendments must be secured to deprive them of 
that right. He had been alarmed both at the im- 
mense and unrestrained power exercised by the 
President during the Civil War, and at the arbi- 
trary power asserted by Congress during recon- 
struction ; and he could see that, if the vitality of 
the States should be destroyed, the power taken 
from them must inevitably fall into the hands of 
the President or of Congress. 

No case came before the Supreme Court at this 
time which involved the right of the individual to 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 373 

freedom. In December, 1865, a negro was form- 
ally admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court by 
Chase's direct influence ; and in 1867 he ordered 
that in the district of North Carolina the marshal 
should summon negroes as well as whites to serve 
on the jury. His decision in the Maryland Appren- 
tice Case has already been noted. The only slavery 
cases which came before the Supreme Court in- 
volved the enforcement of unexecuted contracts for 
buying slaves. In the first of these cases ( White v. 
Hart, 1872) suit was brought for the collection of 
a note given in 1859, the consideration for which 
was a slave. Though the Georgia Constitution of 
1868 positively denied all jurisdiction for the en- 
forcement of any debt of that kiud, the Supreme 
Court held that neither a state constitution nor a 
statute could impair the obligation of the contract. 
In the case of Osborn v. Nicholson, decided at the 
same time, the court construed the Thirteenth 
Amendment, and held that it did not alter con- 
tractual rights which had previously accrued. From 
these decisions the chief justice was the only mem- 
ber of the court to dissent, and his opinion goes 
back to the same general principle as did his argu- 
ment in the Van Zandt Case, twenty-four years 
earlier. He held " that contracts for the purchase 
and sale of slaves were and are against sound 
morals and justice, and without support except in 
positive law," and that all laws which supported 
slavery and slavery contracts were annulled by the 
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The 



374 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

same question came up again in Bryce v. Tabb, 
in 1873, and the court took substantially the same 
ground. 

A large group of Supreme Court cases turned 
upon the effect of the Civil War on the rights of 
property. In two cases, United States v. Ander- 
son (1869-70), and the Protector (1871), the 
court passed on the important question as to when 
the war legally began and ended, but the two de- 
cisions did not harmonize. In the first case the 
court held without dissent that the proclamation 
of August 20, 1866, was " the first official declara- 
tion that we have on the part of the executive that 
the rebellion was wholly suppressed, and . . . the 
limitation . . . did not begin to run until the re- 
bellion was suppressed throughout the whole coun- 
try." In the second case it was held without dis- 
sent that " the war did not begin or close at the 
same time in all the States ; " but that it began in 
the first seven States by the proclamation of block- 
ade, April 19, 1861, and in Virginia and North 
Carolina by the similar proclamation of April 27, 
1861 ; and that it ceased in twelve States by the 
proclamation of April 12, 1866, and in Texas by 
the proclamation of August 25, 1866. In another 
decision of much importance, The Grapeshot, the 
court upheld provisional courts set up by direction 
of the President, without any legislative authority, 
in parts of the seceded States occupied by the 
federal troops. 

Three important decisions expounded the vexed 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 375 

relation of seceded States to the Union, — the 
question which had so perplexed Congress. In 
Thorington v. Smith, the court without dissent 
recognized as a fact the existence of Confederate 
paper notes during the war, and their use in con- 
tracts then made. Chase, who drew the opinion, 
took the ground that the Confederacy " was an act- 
ual government of all the insurgent States ; " 
though he refused to recognize it as having been a 
de facto government, obedience to which did not 
constitute treason to the United States, he did style 
it a " government of paramount force ; . . . the 
rights and obligations of a belligerent were conceded 
to it, in its military character, very soon after the 
war began, from motives of humanity and expedi- 
ency by the United States." This ground was 
modified a little later in the case of United States 
v. Keehler, in which it was held that " the whole 
Confederate power must be regarded by us as a 
usurpation of unlawful authority, incapable of pass- 
ing valid laws," and that " acts of the Confederate 
Congress can have no force, as law, in divesting or 
transferring rights ; " and again in Hickman v. 
Jones, et aL, when it was held that the recognition 
of belligerent rights " did not extend to the pre- 
tended government of the Confederacy. The in- 
tercourse was confined to its military authorities ; 
. . . the act of the Confederate Congress creating 
the tribunal in question was void. It was as if it 
were not." 

Another group of cases in which Chase took 



376 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

particular interest related to the border intercourse, 
which as Secretary of the Treasury he had alter- 
nately prohibited and regulated. In Padelford's 
Case (1869-70), the question was raised as to 
whether Lincoln's amnesty proclamation of Decem- 
ber 8, 1863, restored the property rights of a man 
who had accepted the provisions of that proclama- 
tion. The court held that the amnesty did restore 
him to his rights ; and in this instance^and also in 
the case of United States v. Anderson, the court 
enforced, and thereby gave its adhesion to, the con- 
fiscation acts of 1861-62, and to the acts for the 
collection of abandoned property, under which the 
Treasury had taken possession of immense quan- 
tities of property. In the case of Miller v. United 
States, the court declined to apply the constitu- 
tional amendment allowing jury trial and due pro- 
cess of law to those confiscation acts, on the ground 
that they were not punitive but military acts, ex- 
ercised under power to declare war and make rules 
respecting captures. In the case of Corbett v. Nutt 
(1870-71), the court refused to apply the principle 
of the confiscation acts to commercial transactions 
within the Confederate lines, and thus " to taint 
with invalidity even the commonest transactions of 
exchange in the daily life of these people." 

These decisions taken together show that the 
action of the court was both sensible and humane- 
It refused to hold the internal transactions of in- 
dividuals within the Confederacy, or those of the 
Confederate and state governments with individ- 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 377 

uals, to be simply a mass of futile agreements and 
restrictions ; only so far as acts of individuals or 
of the Confederacy had been made the means of 
opposition to the United States were they held il- 
legal and invalid. In this group of decisions there 
was little dissent, and in no case was Chase among 
the dissenters. 

It was inevitable that the Supreme Court should 
eventually construe and limit the reconstruction 
acts so far as they related to the domain of the 
President. The President's contact with the judi- 
ciary power came principally through his pardon- 
ing power ; and in the Padelf ord, Klein, and Arm- 
strong cases the court affirmed that his pardon re- 
moved any responsibility for an offense connected 
with the rebellion, and that though an act of Con- 
gress might carry the pardon into effect, it could 
not abridge the President's pardoning power. 
Though the right of the President to set up pro- 
visional courts in the seceded States was approved 
by the court, Chase could not forget the arbitrary 
tribunals of the Civil War, to which he had given 
a reluctant consent when they were founded ; and 
therefore in TarbelVs Case (1871), when the Su- 
preme Court denied the power of a state court by 
habeas corpus to release men illegally enlisted 
in the army, Chase felt it his duty to dissent. 
This was very nearly the point which had been 
raised in the Garner controversy in 1856, when as 
governor of Ohio he had insisted on the power of 
state habeas corpus against federal officials. He 



378 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

now entered his protest in favor of his old principle 
that " a writ of habeas corpus may issue from a 
state court to inquire into the validity of imprison- 
ment or detention without a sentence of any court 
whatever, by an officer of the United States," even 
though the President's proclamation of December, 
1863, issued after the adoption of the Fourteenth 
Amendment, was " a public act of which all courts 
of the United States are bound to take notice.' ' 
This decision, however, was not construed to tra- 
verse the authority to exclude from office certain 
classes of persons who had engaged in the rebellion, 
given to Congress under the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment. 

In the famous case of Texas v. White, decided 
in 1869, the court drew nearer to the fundamental 
question of the status of the Southern States dur- 
ing the war ; the opinion was written by the chief 
justice, who considered it his most important work 
on the bench. The critical point before the court 
was whether Texas was a State in the Union in 
1862 and 1865. In a splendid phrase Chase laid 
down his theory of government : " The Constitu- 
tion, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible 
Union composed of indestructible States. When, 
therefore, Texas became one of the United States 
she entered into an indissoluble relation. There 
was no place for reconstruction, or revocation, ex- 
cept through revolution, or through consent of the 
States." Hence, he argued, the acts of the seced- 
ing legislature were null, for " Texas continued to 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 379 

be a State and a State of the Union." But the 
chief justice went on to show that although the 
obligations of Texas were unimpaired, its federal 
relations were affected, and some of its privileges 
for the time being forfeited ; and that under the 
power to guarantee to every State a republican 
form of government Congress had the right to pro- 
vide for the reconstruction of a State. The deci- 
sion not only admitted that reconstruction had been 
constitutionally performed under the acts of Con- 
gress, it also recognized, as legitimate and as re- 
presenting the State, the provisional government 
which was actually in existence before Texas was 
readmitted to representation in Congress. Grier, 
Swayne, and Miller, in dissenting opinions, denied 
that under the provisional government, subject as 
it was to military power and deprived of represen- 
tation in Congress, Texas could be considered as a 
State in the Union. 

The plain effect of this decision was to deny that 
theory of state suicide to which Chase had earlier 
given his adhesion ; for it asserted that, as soon as 
the war ended and the people of Texas chose to 
reconstitute the government, they recovered state- 
hood, though not necessarily complete privileges 
in the Union, since those involved a question to be 
decided by the national government. The " Nation " 
said of the decision : " The Supreme Court has 
thus in this judgment placed the nation and the 
State upon exactly the same footing : whatever 
weakens the one weakens the other ; whoever denies 



\ 



380 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

the historical origin of the one denies the same 
origin for the other. This theory gives the greatest 
security both to the State and to the Union." In 
the announcement of this decision the court placed 
itself side by side with Congress and the new Pre- 
sident, in affirming that the process of reconstruc- 
tion had been constitutional, or at least allowable, 
and could no longer be questioned. 

Three years later, in the case of White v. Hart, 
(1872), though Chase dissented on one point, he 
acquiesced in a sweeping approval of the whole 
system of constitutional reconstruction. " The 
action of Congress upon the subject," said he, 
" cannot be inquired into. The case is clearly one 
in which the judicial is bound to follow the action 
of the political department of the government, and 
is concluded by it." Congress had never been 
quite certain of the constitutional ground upon 
which it reconstructed the Southern States, and the 
Supreme Court eliminated most of the prevail- 
ing theories. The theory of state suicide it denied 
resolutely : " At no time were the rebellious 
States out of the pale of the Union. Their rights 
under the Constitution were suspended but not 
destroyed. Their constitutional duties and obliga- 
tions were unaffected and remained the same." 
The doctrine of conquered provinces was also de- 
nied. " The Constitution," said the court, " as- 
sumed that the government and the Union which 
it created, and the States which it incorporated into 
the Union, would be indestructible and perpetual." 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 381 

The decision thus rested squarely upon a modifica- 
tion of the theory of forfeited rights. " A citizen 
is still a citizen though guilty of crime and visited 
with punishment. His political rights may be put 
in abeyance or forfeited." 

As might have been expected, so soon as the 
Southern States were again admitted to seats in 
Congress there was a tendency in the South to put 
an end by violence to negro suffrage ; hence Con- 
gress passed a statute, the so-called Civil Eights 
Bill, under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend- 
ments, to protect the negroes. "With reference to 
this act Chase, in the term of 1871-72, took the 
unusual step of writing to the judges on his circuit, 
asking them to send up a divided opinion on a 
test case for adjudication by the Supreme Court. 
No such case reached the court during Chase's life- 
time, and his judicial activity was now practically 
over. 

A short time before his death, other issues arising 
out of the amendments were presented to the court 
in the Slaughter-house Cases , which are the most 
important and far-reaching of the series of recon- 
struction decisions. The decision was rendered by 
a nearly divided court : with Field, Bradley, and 
Swayne, Chase dissented from the opinion of the 
court ; but he was too ill to prepare a statement of 
his reasons, hence it can only be inferred that he 
agreed with Field that the Fourteenth Amendment 
was intended not only to protect the negro's rights, 
but to remove forever from the States the power of 



382 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

making distinctions between different classes of 
persons. The case involved the monopoly of the 
slaughtering business conferred by the legislature 
of Louisiana; and the counsel whose arguments 
seemed to find favor with the minority of the court 
was John A. Campbell, who had resigned from the 
court in 1861 when his State seceded. His con- 
tention was that, by forbidding other butchers to 
slaughter for the New Orleans market, the govern- 
ment of Louisiana had acted contrary to the Thir- 
teenth Amendment, which prohibited involutary 
servitude; and that, in violation of the Fourteenth 
Amendment, the petitioners, engaged in the busi- 
ness of slaughtering, were deprived of the privi- 
leges and immunities of citizens, and were also 
deprived of their property without due process of 
law. 

The argument drawn from the Thirteenth Amend- 
ment was swept away by the court with little more 
than the remark that " with a microscopic search 
[to] endeavor to find in it a reference to servitudes 
which may have been attached to property in cer- 
tain localities, requires an effort, to say the least of 
it." The main object of the decision was to con- 
sider and construe the Fourteenth Amendment, 
and the majority of the court put upon it a narrow 
construction which left to the States most of the 
powers which they had possessed before the Civil 
War. They held that historically the amendment 
was intended to overthrow the Dred Scott decision, 
for the benefit of the negro race ; indeed, that all the 



SECOND STAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION 383 

amendments were " addressed to the grievances of 
that race and designed to remedy them." " Where 
it is declared that Congress shall have the power 
to enforce that article, was it intended to bring 
within the power of Congress the entire domain of 
civil rights, heretofore belonging exclusively to the 
States ? " This reasoning of course withdrew from 
federal legislation large areas of protective law 
which had been supposed to be vested in Congress, 
and it was accepted by the whole country as a with- 
drawal of powers which would otherwise have been 
exercised by the national government. In fact, the 
consciousness of the court that it was acting as a 
balance-wheel was expressed in the final paragraph 
of the decision : " But whatever fluctuations may 
be seen in the history of public opinion on this sub- 
ject, during the period of our national existence, 
we think it will be found that this court, so far as 
its functions require, has always held with a steady 
and an even hand the balance between State and 
federal power." 

With this decision the Civil War virtually ended, 
and the Supreme Court reached the height of its 
conservative influence. During the eight years of 
his service as chief justice, Chase's influence had 
been on the whole for moderation, for the continu- 
ance of the Union as he had first known it, for the 
pruning of the excessive powers which had grown 
out of the Civil War, and for the protection of 
human rights. Though he could not agree in this 
final decision, his own influence had long been ex- 
erted in the direction which it marked. 



CHAPTER XV 

FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 

In the previous chapter account has been taken 
of the principal political decisions of the Supreme 
Court under Chase's leadership, decisions which 
dealt with broad questions of human liberty, of 
arbitrary government, of the methods of protecting 
civilians, and of the relations of the departments 
of government with each other; decisions which 
involved conflicts of jurisdiction between state 
and national courts, or between civil and military 
tribunals. Side by side with these judgments 
came the usual series of ordinary private cases in- 
volving property or franchises ; but the immense 
change in the system of public finance caused some 
of these latter controversies to bring before the 
court grave constitutional questions growing out of 
the Civil War. New systems of taxation involved 
vexed questions of personal rights and of the privi- 
leges of the States ; the revision of the banking 
system of the country made necessary new defini- 
tions of the power of Congress over corporations ; 
and the government paper currency, and especially 
the legal-tender notes, furnished a new subject for 
judicial settlement. 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 385 

In the most important tax case during the Civil 
War, People of New York v. Commissioner of 
Taxes, 1862, the Supreme Court upheld the ex- 
emption from taxation of such United States bonds 
as formed part of the capital of banks. The re- 
organized court saw no reason for interfering with 
the execution of the laws as they stood ; and in only 
one case, Hepburn v. Griswold, held any part of a 
financial statute to be unconstitutional. On the 
contrary, besides many cases in which principles of 
limitation on state and municipal finance were laid 
down, the court built up a new system of law based 
on the national powers of taxation. First by impli- 
cation and later by specific decisions, it enforced the 
income tax, the internal revenue, and the modifica- 
tions of the tariff. In these decisions Chase had 
the rare opportunity as a justice of the Supreme 
Court to review judicially and to construe the 
statutes which he himself had set in motion as an 
administrative officer. His familiarity with the 
revenue system gave him a special competency 
and aided him. to strengthen the whole system of 
national finance. 

The first important financial decision was ren- 
dered in 1866-67 in the License Tax Cases, which 
turned upon a provision of the internal revenue act 
of 1864 prohibiting persons from engaging in cer- 
tain trades or occupations, including those of sell- 
ing lottery tickets and liquors at retail, until they 
should have obtained a license. The court held 
that such legislation was allowable because the 



\ 



386 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

licenses were " mere receipts for taxes," and gave 
no authority to carry on a business which was pro- 
hibited by a State ; but at the same time the opin- 
ions most explicitly set forth that Congress had 
no power of regulation of commerce or business 
within the State, except as incidental to the exer- 
cise of powers clearly implied from expressly 
granted powers. Between the argument and the 
final decision in these cases, Congress by new legis- 
lation reiterated the power to stop the exercise of 
a business till the license was paid, and the court 
referred incidentally to the new statute with clear 
approval of its constitutionality. 

Three years later the court had occasion again 
to decide fundamental questions of taxation, and 
between 1869 and 1871 it rendered three decisions, 
in all of which may be seen the influence of Chase's 
identification with the financial measures of the 
Civil War. The first of these, Veazie Bank v. 
Fenno, 1869-70, was a test case upon the most 
sweeping portion of the national bank legislation, 
the ten per cent tax on state bank notes, which 
Chase had so long and so unsuccessfully advocated 
when Secretary of the Treasury, and which was first 
imposed by an act of March 3, 1865. The opinion 
was written by the chief justice, and is in effect a 
brief history of his purpose and understanding in 
drafting the national bank legislation. To defend 
the principle that Congress might prohibit state 
bank notes under color of taxing them out of exist- 
ence was difficult, in the face of the long estab- 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 387 

lished legal principle that the States might not tax 
a federal corporation in the same fashion ; and the 
prohibitory tax had always seemed drastic. It was 
easy to dispose of the contention that the tax was 
"direct," and therefore must be assessed in pro- 
portion to population ; but it was more difficult to 
make out that the United States might tax a fran- 
chise granted by a State, and presumably an instru- 
mentality of the State, and might make the tax so 
excessive as to nullify a power of issuing notes, 
which was unquestionably possessed by the States. 
" The first answer to this is," said Chase, " that the 
judicial cannot prescribe to the legislative depart- 
ments of the government limitations upon the exer- 
cise of its acknowledged powers, and that as a 
means to provide a currency for the whole country, 
Congress might restrain the issue of their [the 
States] notes." Only two of the justices, Nelson 
and Davis, dissented, and the principle of the tax 
has never since been disturbed by Congress or the 
court. 

The State Tonnage Tax Cases in 1870-71 had 
no special relation to civil war finance, though they 
asserted the superior force of national over state 
taxes ; but in the Case of the State Tax on For- 
eign-held Bonds, in 1872-73, the court by five 
to four affirmed the important doctrine that a 
State could not tax bonds held by persons in an- 
other State, though secured by property within its 
limits. 

The last of the important tax cases during 



388 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Chase's continuance in the court, Collector v. Day, 
1870-71, raised the general question of the constitu- 
tionality of the national income tax, which had been 
laid for the first time in accordance with Chase's 
suggestions, and had been collected under his super- 
vision. The immediate question was whether an 
income tax could be levied on the salary of a state 
officer ; and the court held such incomes to be ex- 
empt, on the same ground that would prevent a 
State from taxing the salary of a federal officer. 
Throughout its decision the court recognized the 
constitutionality of the income tax as it stood ; and 
the only ordinary financial legislation which it dis- 
allowed was a proviso in an appropriation act (case 
of United States v. Klein), inserted to prevent the 
proof of claims by persons who had adhered to the 
Confederacy. 

The general result, then, of the decisions which 
related to the finances of the Civil War was to 
uphold the legislation of Congress ; and in several 
instances Chase took the opportunity to vindicate 
his policy by a brief historical and judicial re- 
view of the principles and probable reasons of that 
legislation. The most important decision was that 
upholding the tax on state bank notes ; and that 
principle has never since been disturbed. The 
next in consequence was that affirming the income 
tax. Twenty-five years later, by the narrowest 
majority, the court practically reversed this deci- 
sion, and by implication held the statutes of 1861 
and 1862 unconstitutional. 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 389 

Undoubtedly the greatest deviation from the 
former constitutional principles of the government 
made during the Civil Wax was the issue of legal 
tender notes. It was much contested at the time 
the first statute was passed in 1862 ; test cases were 
made up within a few months which could not be 
prevented from eventually reaching the Supreme 
Court ; and the history of the issues of government 
notes from 1862 to 1869 was such as to give pause 
to some of the early supporters of the legal tender 
principle. So long as Chase remained in the Trea- 
sury he felt it incumbent upon him to defend both 
the expediency and the constitutionality of the 
notes. In 1863 the first important test case was 
made up in New York, although Chase seemed to 
expect that, notwithstanding the legal tender clause, 
the state banks might be bound to redeem their 
outstanding issues in specie. David Dudley Field 
and S. A. Foote were designated in behalf of the 
Treasury Department to argue in favor of the con- 
stitutionality of the act, and George T. Curtis wrote 
to Chase to remonstrate on " the improper effort 
on the part of the administration to influence the 
court of the State.'' Both the New York and the 
Pennsylvania courts speedily affirmed the consti- 
tutionality of the legal tender act, and the judges 
in both States sent messages or letters to Chase to 
inform him of their decisions. It is plain, there- 
fore, that he was recognized, the country over, as the 
champion of the constitutionality of the acts, and 
in a letter of May 18, 1864, he says to a friend : 



390 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

" I do not agree with you in advocating that the 
Constitution prohibits the issue of legal tender 
notes under authority of Congress." 

In the same letter Chase goes on to say : " I do 
agree in the opinion that an inflated paper currency 
is a great evil, and should be reformed as soon as 
possible." The sentence really indicates the begin- 
ning of the change in his mind, as he saw the dan- 
gerous results of the legal tender clause, and when 
the war was over and he saw the notes still con- 
tinue, he took alarm, and began to urge the speedy 
resumption of specie payments. What he had 
first intended was only to make a provision for a 
national exigency, to issue $150,000,000, which 
could be withdrawn as soon as he could place 
his loans and organize the national bank system; 
what he saw in 1869 was a prosperous country 
accepting • issues then irredeemable and likely to 
be unredeemed, and refusing to provide either 
for their withdrawal or their restoration to a specie 



In the original draft of the statute which came 
from Chase's hands, the issue of notes, even without 
the legal tender clause, was stated to be for " tem- 
porary purposes." As soon as the war was over, 
Congress, under the efficient lead of Hugh McCul- 
loch, the able Secretary of the Treasury, proceeded 
to redeem those notes, of which nearly $450,000,- 
000 were then outstanding. December 8, 1865, 
with but six negative votes, the House voted that it 
" approved the contraction of currency with a view 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 391 

to as early a resumption of specie payments as 
the business interest of this country will permit ; " 
and the secretary took advantage of the large in- 
come of the government and the sales of military 
material to withdraw legal tenders as fast as they 
came into the Treasury. On March 12, 1866, how- 
ever, Congress limited this necessary process by 
directing that $10,000,000 of the notes might be 
retired in six months and 84,000,000 every month 
from that time on ; and even this limited with- 
drawal was checked by the commercial disasters of 
1866 and by reduction of the national income. 

Meantime greenbacks circulated everywhere, side 
by side with the national bank notes, and no- 
thing but more bank currency could take their 
place. The banks, however, were already looked 
upon with suspicion as capitalistic monopolies, and 
on January 22, 1868, the Secretary of the Treasury 
was directed to reissue legal tenders as they came 
in, leaving outstanding a maximum of $382,000,- 
000, which was reduced gradually to $346,000,000; 
this amount was in 1878 made permanent. John- 
son outbid Congress, in his last annual message of 
December, 1868, by proposing that the bondholders 
be compelled to receive legal tenders in exchange 
for the face of their bonds, in sixteen annual in- 
stallments without interest ; and though Congress 
on the last day of Johnson's term voted that the 
government "solemnly pledges its faith to make 
provision, at the earliest practical period, for the 
redemption of the United States notes in coin," it 



392 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

took no steps to redeem that pledge, and a party 
sprang up which desired to base the national 
finance on unlimited paper money. 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had been listen- 
ing twice over to arguments against the consti- 
tutionality of the legal tenders. Grant became 
President in 1869, and appointed Boutwell his 
Secretary of the Treasury; it was seen that no 
remedy for the evils of paper money was likely to 
go through Congress ; and hence the Supreme 
Court undertook to settle the question by annulling 
the legal tender legislation and thus compelling 
a return to a " specie basis." The continuance of a 
war measure of finance in time of peace seemed to 
Chase especially unfortunate because, by 1868, the 
national banks were working so well that they had 
$300,000,000 of circulation, and had thus justified 
his original expectation that they would eventually 
furnish a currency adequate in amount and per- 
fectly secure for all the needs of the country. To 
his mind, the time had come when the temporary 
makeshift of the legal tenders might safely give 
place to a larger national bank currency. 

In the term of 1867-68, the case of Hepburn v. 
Griswold, involving the constitutionality of the 
legal tenders, reached the Supreme Court on appeal 
from the state court of Kentucky, Up to this 
time, this appears to have been the only decision 
of a highest state court against the legal validity 
of the issues. The case was argued and adjourned ; 
and, at the next term, 1868-69, it was reargued, 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 393 



but still no decision was forthcoming. That the 
chief justice and others of the court felt uneasy, 
was, however, shown by three important limita- 
tations which the court in 1866-69 placed upon 
the legal tenders. In the case of Lane County v. 
Oregon, the court held that the notes were not 
legal tender for state taxes, because " Congress 
must have had in contemplation debts originating 
in contracts or claims carried into judgment and 
only debts of this character." In the case of 
The Bank v. Supervisors, the court took the gen- 
eral ground that the United States notes were " ob- 
ligations, — therefore strictly securities," and hence 
excepted from taxation ; and, in the case of Bronson 
v. Modes, 1868-69, the court, with one dissent, en- 
forced a contract specifically promising the pay- 
ment of specie. 

These cases not only limited the uses of the 
legal tenders, by distinctly excepting from the 
legal tender privilege all express specie contracts : 
they also treated the notes as evidences of national 
debt rather than as currency ; and, in the last of 
the cases, the chief justice foreshadowed more 
sweeping action by the remark : " The quality of 
these notes as legal tenders belongs to another 
discussion." At that time, December, 1868, he had 
already made up his mind to disallow the legal 
tender clause, and was discussing the question 
with the other justices over the case of Hepburn 
v. Griswold. At length, in December, 1869, the 
court came to a determination, and directed opin- 






\ 



394 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ions to be prepared. In addition to the two 
arguments heard in this case, the question had five 
times been presented to the court in other cases, 
which they had chosen to decide on grounds not 
involving the legal tender controversy. No judicial 
question was ever more thoroughly discussed : if 
Chase and his colleagues erred, it was not for want 
of information, or of argument by distinguished 
counsel, including a representative of the admin- 
istration, or of long deliberations by the judges. 

Unfortunately the question was so serious, and 
involved such strong political passions, that when 
the long expected decision was handed down, Feb- 
ruary 7, 1870, the court was almost evenly di- 
vided ; but in this case the chief justice was one 
of the five who united in declaring that the Con- 
stitution had not authorized the issuance of notes 
which should be legal tender in payment of debts 
contracted before the statute. Since by the Bron- 
son case the court had recognized as legal all con- 
tracts specifying specie, the court might be expected 
thenceforward to hold that notes could be legal 
tender only for debts which had been incurred 
after February 25, 1862, and for which no other 
medium of payment had been distinctly stated. 

The opinion was prepared by Chase, and is prac- 
tically a legal defense for a change of mind which 
was founded really on financial and political con- 
siderations. The argument makes few references 
to previous decisions of the court as sustaining 
its principles ; instead, there is an appeal to the 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 395 

general theory of the Constitution, and an argu- 
ment upon the unfavorable effects of irredeemable 
paper money. To be sure, he holds that the legal 
tender act was an impairment of contracts, but he 
does not dispose of the argument that the federal 
government might, under some circumstances, im- 
pair contracts. The main argument is essentially 
Jeffersonian : while Chase accepted the familiar 
constitutional doctrine that Congress might choose 
the methods of exercising clearly granted powers, 
he denied that there are any powers, such as the 
dissenting justices described, resulting from the 
general nature of the Constitution. On the argu- 
ment that the legal tender quality was necessary as 
a war measure, he replied that this was a mistake 
in the facts, since notes without that quality freely 
circulated on equal terms with the legal tenders. 

Throughout the argument there is almost no- 
thing to suggest that the writer had any special 
opportunity of knowing the purposes of Congress 
or judging the necessity of the legal tender clause. 
But at the end he adds a paragraph evidently in- 
tended as a personal justification : " It is not sur- 
prising that amid the tumult of the late Civil War, 
and under the influence of apprehensions for the 
safety of the republic almost universal, different 
views, never before entertained by American 
statesmen or jurists, were adopted by many. The 
time was not favorable to considerate reflection 
upon the constitutional limits of legislative or exe- 
cutive authority. If power was assumed from 



396 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

patriotic motives, the assumption found ready jus- 
tification in patriotic hearts. Many who doubted 
yielded their doubts ; many who did not doubt were 
silent. Some who were strongly averse to making 
government notes a legal tender felt themselves 
constrained to acquiesce in the views of the advo- 
cates of the measure. Not a few who then insisted 
upon its necessity, or acquiesced in that view, 
have since the return of peace, and under the influ- 
ence of the calmer time, reconsidered their conclu- 
sions, and now concur in those which we have just 
announced." 

Hepburn v. Griswold appears to have been 
selected out of several pending cases, because it 
turned on a tender of notes in satisfaction of a 
contract which antedated the first legal tender act. 
Chase again and again limits the effect of the deci- 
sion to such contracts ; and Justice Grier expressed 
the opinion that the legal tender act was never in- 
tended to cover previous contracts, and that hence 
the case could be decided without holding that act 
unconstitutional. But the principles of Chase's 
decision were just as applicable to later as to 
earlier contracts ; and throughout he is arguing 
against the whole system. The court was not 
then ready to go further and apply its principles 
to contracts then in daily making ; but Chase was 
convinced on that subject also, and shortly drew 
up an opinion which he expected to file in dissent 
in another case, maintaining that any creditor who 
was entitled to " dollars " might insist on coin dol- 
lars. 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 397 

The status of the question in February, 1870, 
was as follows : the Supreme Court would protect 
creditors in refusing to accept legal tenders for 
debts incurred and contracts made before February 
25, 1862, or where specie had been specifically pro- 
mised ; hence the legal tender acts were in part un- 
constitutional ; Chief Justice Chase had examined 
and found insufficient the arguments of Secretary 
Chase ; and it was widely expected that the court 
would proceed to declare void the whole system of 
legal tenders. 

In the country at large the decision was received 
as though it meant an immediate dissolution of 
existing contracts. At that time gold stood at 
about 120, so that, if the decision held, all debts 
and obligations would speedily represent one and a 
fifth times their value as here expressed in green- 
backs. This was a weak point for the court, for it 
set against it the powerful influence of many cor- 
porations, especially those, like the Pennsylvania 
Railroad, with maturing ante helium obligations. 
As a railroad president wrote to Chase : " How do 
you suppose the Railroads of the country are to 
pay their interest in gold and receive only a depre- 
ciated currency for their revenues, limited as they 
are by their charters to a fixed price ? Would n't 
we have a nice time in making Passengers pay 
their fares in gold ? " And another correspondent 
wrote : " Your decision in regard to legal tenders, 
if not reversed, is likely to cause the greatest pos- 
sible distress and ruin among the classes of people 



398 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

already in debt ; among the rest, very many widows 
and orphans owing money on mortgage of real 
estate of a long date back." To be sure there 
had been similar distress and loss soon after the 
time of the passage of the legal tender acts ; but 
that episode was over. The real difficulty with the 
decision was that it was an attempt to make up for 
the failure of Congress to bring the country back 
to a specie basis ; in view of the probable shock of 
an immediate change it seems very unlikely that 
the decision would ever have been pronounced, had 
McCulloch been allowed to continue his contrac- 
tion policy so that the defects of the system might 
gradually have righted themselves. It was further 
unfortunate that the court should have taken the 
responsibility of declaring a statute void even with 
reference to ante helium contracts. In his opinion 
Chase said: "This court always approached the 
consideration of questions of this nature reluc- 
tantly ; and its constant rule of decision has been, 
and is, that Acts of Congress must be regarded as 
constitutional, unless clearly shown to be other- 
wise." The court might safely have drawn further 
limitations around the legal tenders ; or it might 
have held the act to be a war measure which would 
expire by its own virtual limitation when the war 
was definitely over. To set itself against Congress, 
against the President, against corporations, and 
against a popular prejudice, and that by a vote of 
five to three, was an unsafe experiment. The small 
effect of the decision in the money markets showed 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 399 

that the great financiers did not believe that the 
legal tender quality would really be destroyed ; and 
in view of the greenback agitation of the time it 
was dangerous to hold that a war-time statute 
might be invalidated, after its work was done ; for 
the same principle might apply in the popular 
mind to government bonds. 

At the time this decision was rendered the court 
was already in process of reorganization. Grier, j 
one of the five justices who adhered to the decision, 
resigned before it was formally pronounced, so that 
strictly speaking the court stood four to three in 
the decision. The President at once nominated a 
successor, Strong of Pennsylvania, and also made 
an additional appointment, shortly before author- 
ized by a statute increasing the number of the as- 
sociate justices to eight, by designating Bradley of 
New Jersey. It was Chase's positively expressed 
belief that through those appointments the court was 
reorganized with the purpose of securing a reversal 
of the decision in the Hepburn v. Griswold case ; 
and President Grant, his Attorney-General, Judge 
Hoar, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. 
Boutwell, were openly accused by the press of a 
conspiracy to "pack the Supreme Court for the 
purpose of establishing repudiation as a constitu- 
tional doctrine." 

If by " packing " is to be understood the appoint- 
ment of men whose views on political questions 
were likely to be those of the administration, the 
charge is true, and is equally true of President 



400 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Lincoln and of all of his successors down to 1886 ; 
for during that whole period no Supreme Court 
judge was designated who was not of the same po- 
litical party as the President for the time being. 
If " packing " means the selection of individuals 
with a previous understanding of their views on 
the question of legal tenders, and with instructions 
to bring about a reversal of the actual decision, 
the evidence shows that the charge is unfounded. 
Neither Strong nor Bradley was the first choice of 
the President. To the new judgeship, created by 
the act of 1869, the President first nominated 
Attorney-General Hoar ; and when Justice Grier, 
in December, 1869, gave in his resignation, to take 
effect on February first, the President nominated 
as his successor ex-secretary Stanton, who had the 
support of every Kepublican member of the Senate, 
but died four days afterward. The Senate refused 
to confirm Judge Hoar, and thereupon the Pre- 
sident, on February 7, 1870, simultaneously nomi- 
nated Bradley and Strong. 

I On February 7, at noon, the court rendered its 
decision in the Hepburn v. Griswold case, and the 
coincidence of date led to a subsequent charge, 
that the moment the President heard of the de- 
cision he took steps to annul it by appointing two 
faithful supporters of the legal tender act; but 
Judge Hoar was consulted upon these appoint- 
ments, and no suggestion was made to him or by 
him that the legal tender cases bore on the appoint- 
ments ; the members of the cabinet when the nomi- 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 401 

nations were discussed had no knowledge of any 
" packing ; " and it is completely established that, 
unless by some unprofessional indiscretion of one 
of the justices, the nature of the decision of the 
court was not known to the President at the time 
the two new judges were nominated; and Judge 
Hoar expected until the decision was announced 
that Chase would stand for the legality of the legal 
tenders. 

Though the President and the Attorney-Gen- 
eral stand absolved from a deliberate purpose of 
changing a majority of four to three into a minor- 
ity of four to five, there can be no reasonable 
doubt that the President and his advisers intended, 
as vacancies occurred in the court, to fill them with 
men who would reflect the opinions of the Eepubli- 
can party ; and that party had declined to commit 
itself even to the speedy restoration of the notes to 
a gold basis. It was true that Strong, as state 
judge in Pennsylvania, had rendered a decision in 
favor of the constitutionality of the legal tenders, 
and so had most of the judges in the sixteen other 
States before whom the question had come. Yet 
there was no lack of good lawyers in the Republi- 
can party who had not committed themselves upon 
the question. Had it been the purpose of the 
President to choose two judges who would balance 
each other, he could have found two such men; 
he and his advisers, with few exceptions, desired 
the legal tender act to stand ; and the appointments 
were generally taken to mean that it would be re- 
affirmed. 




SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Justice Strong entered the court February 14, 
and Justice Bradley, March 24 ; whatever the rea- 
son for their appointments, the two new justices 
were no sooner inducted than they began a dra- 
matic struggle by seeking to call up a pending case 
upon which the legal tender decision might be re- 
versed in the same term of the court in which it 
had been rendered. Among the long-standing 
causes not yet decided was Lathams v. United 
States, a suit involving the question of specie con- 
tracts. The Lathams had a contract with the 
United States, executed in 1855, with a stipulation 
that payments were to be made in " good and law- 
ful money of the coin of the United States ; " but 
Chase, as Secretary of the Treasury, in 1863 re- 
fused to pay coin, and tendered greenbacks, which 
had been received under protest. Suits, claiming 
the difference in value between greenbacks and gold 
coin, had been continued, to wait for the decision 
of the principle in the Hepburn Case. Although 
special leave was given to the United States to 
appear in the case because it involved the consti- 
tutionality of an act of Congress, Chase foresaw 
trouble and repeatedly announced that no further 
arguments would be heard on the legal tender 
question, that having already been decided in the 
Hepburn Case. However, on the second day after 
Bradley formally took his seat, the new judge re- 
opened the question by urging the court to take up 
the Lathams Case, and suggesting that the legal 
tender question might thereupon be argued; the 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 403 

three dissentients in the Hepburn Case voted with 
the two incoming judges to hear new arguments, 
with the plain intention to reverse the recent de- 
cision forthwith. Chase and his three adherents 
protested, stood on the technicalities of the internal 
rules of the court, and resisted to the utmost ; but 
in vain. When the case came on for argument, 
however, the counsel for the Lathams, J. M. Car- 
lisle, declined to proceed further, on the ground 
that the rights of his clients were already pro- 
tected ; and against the protest of Justice Bradley ( 
the case was discontinued. ^J 

In the course of the proceedings occurred an 
incident which showed tension and almost hostility 
between the two factions of the court; the chief 
justice stated that the court had agreed that the 
principle of the Hepburn v. Griswold case should 
apply to all later cases. Justice Miller thereupon 
stated that this was not the statement of the court 
but of the chief justice, and the justices on the 
bench expressed their differences of memory in 
unjudicial fashion. The effect of the withdrawal 
of this case was to prevent the raising of the legal 
tender question at that time, and the court finally 
adjourned without further action. But its un- 
settled state of opinion was well known; and it 
was confidently predicted that within a few months 
it would overrule itself. 

The expectation that the legal tenders would 
again be held constitutional was so widespread 
that the premium on gold was not reduced, and 



404 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

there was no general tendency to specify coin in 
contracts. Meanwhile the so-called Sheep case 
{Knox v. Lee) had long been pending in the court, 
and it involved the question of contracts subse- 
quent in date to the legal-tender act. The contro- 
versy had arisen in March, 1863, and the United 
States Circuit Court of Texas had held in 1867 
that the contract might be satisfied by the payment 
of greenbacks ; at the same time came up the case 
of Parker v. Davis, brought up from the Massa- 
chusetts state courts, which involved the question 
of a contract made before 1863. In the term of 
1870-71 the United States Supreme Court heard 
elaborate arguments in these cases ; but to listen to 
argument at all was evidence that the court did not 
intend to hold itself bound by the decision in the 
case of Hepburn v. Griswold. When, on May 1, 
1871, a decision was announced, the opinion of the 
majority of the court was drawn by Justice Strong 
supported by four other justices, and the chief 
justice, with the three who had agreed with him 
in 1870, dissented. But though the decision was 
announced, the court took the very unusual step 
of delaying the statement of its reasons. The 
chief justice was very ill, and unable to write an 
argument, and the texts of the opinions were there- 
fore not made public till January 15, 1872. 

This time the court distinctly faced the question 
both of ante helium and of later contracts, and the 
first paragraph contains the essence of the whole 
argument : " It would be difficult to overestimate 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 405 

the consequences which must follow our decision. 
They will affect the entire business of the country, 
and take hold of the possible continued existence 
of the government. If it be held by this court 
that Congress had no constitutional power, under 
any circumstances or in any emergency, to make 
treasury notes a legal tender for the payment of 
all debts (a power confessedly possessed by every 
independent sovereignty other than the United 
States), the government is without the means of 
self-preservation which, all must admit, may in cer- 
tain contingencies become indispensable, even if 
they were not so when the acts of Congress now 
called in question were enacted. ... If, contrary 
to the expectation of all parties to these contracts, 
legal tender notes are rendered unavailable, the 
government has become an instrument of the gross- 
est injustice ; all debtors are loaded with an obliga- 
tion it was never contemplated they should assume ; 
a large percentage is added to every debt, and such 
must become the demand for gold to satisfy con- 
tracts, that ruinous sacrifices, general distress, and 
bankruptcy may be expected.' ' 

The court was careful not to pin itself too 
closely to specific powers of Congress ; instead, it 
recognized " that general power over currency 
which has always been an acknowledged attribute 
of sovereignty in every other civilized country than 
our own." To this general power the court adds 
a distinct assertion of the doctrine of resulting 
powers: "It is allowable to group together any 



406 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

number of them and infer from them all that the 
power claimed has been conferred." The court also 
argues very strongly that the legal tender quality 
was absolutely necessary for the life of the govern- 
ment. " Something revived the drooping faith of 
the people ; something brought immediately to the 
government's aid the resources of the nation, and 
something enabled the successful prosecution of 
the war, and the preservation of the national life. 
What was it, if not the legal tender enactments ? " 

Finally, the court left no doubt as to the purpose 
of its decision. " We hold the acts of Congress 
constitutional as applied to contracts made either 
before or after their passage. In so holding we 
overrule so much of what was decided in Hepburn 
v. Griswold, 8 Wallace, 603, as ruled the Acts un- 
warranted by the Constitution so far as they apply 
to contracts made before their enactment. That 
case was decided by a divided court, and by a court 
having a less number of judges than the law then 
in existence provided this court shall have. . . . 
And it is no unprecedented thing in courts of last 
resort, both in this country and in England, to 
overrule decisions previously made. We agree 
this should not be done inconsiderately, but in a 
case of such far-reaching consequences as the pre- 
sent, thoroughly convinced as we are that Congress 
has not transgressed its powers, we regard it as 
our duty so to decide and to affirm both these 
judgments." 

The separate concurring opinion of Bradley was 






FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 407 

based not so much on the theory of constitutional 
government as on what governments ought in the na- 
ture of things to be. " It seems to be a self-evident 
proposition that it (the general government) is in- 
vested with all these inherent and implied powers 
which at the time of adopting the Constitution 
were generally considered to belong to every gov- 
ernment as such." He goes further: Since the 
States are prohibited from issuing legal tender 
notes, and there is no express prohibition of the 
federal government, it must have been expected 
that it would issue them, and the power to emit 
treasury notes " has been exercised by the govern- 
ment without question for a large portion of its 
history. This being conceded, the incidental power 
of giving such bills the quality of legal tender fol- 
lows almost as a matter of course. . . . Can the 
poor man's cattle and horses and corn be thus 
taken by the government as the public exigency 
requires it, and cannot the rich man's notes and 
bonds be in like manner taken to reach the same 
end?" 

For our purposes the most important of the 
justices' opinions is that filed by the chief justice, 
which was a disquisition in the familiar vein on the 
implied powers of Congress and the limitations on 
Congress. It was impossible for him to ignore the 
criticism made upon him in the majority opinion, 
that " even the head of the treasury represented to 
Congress the necessity for making the new issues 
legal tender, or rather, declared it impossible to 



k 



408 SALMON PORTLAND GHASE 

avoid the necessity ." The statement was undeni- 
able, and the only manly explanation was that 
which he made : " Examination and reflection under 
more propitious circumstances have satisfied him 
that this opinion was erroneous, and he does not 
hesitate to declare it. He would do so just as un- 
hesitatingly if his favor to the legal tender clause 
had been at that time decided, and his opinion as 
to the constitutionality of the measure clear." 

Chase's attitude upon the legal tenders is one of 
the critical points in his life, and involves three 
distinct questions, — the ultimate argument as to 
the constitutionality of the statutes, the argument 
as presented by the Supreme Court, and the re- 
sponsibility for his change of mind. The question 
of constitutionality goes to the very bottom of the 
national authority. We have already seen that 
no suggestion of legal-tender notes had ever been 
taken up by a responsible administrator till 
Chase's letter to the Committee of "Ways and 
Means in February, 1862, although treasury notes 
had been very familiar. Perhaps the argument 
over the constitutionality of forced issues may best 
be put in the form that it not only would have 
been held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court 
before the Civil War, but would have been con- 
trary to the principles of government then estab- 
lished ; but that during and after the Civil War 
it was constitutional because the government had 
changed its foundations. Both Congress and the 
President had freely departed in many directions 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 409 

from any power reasonably implied in the Consti- 
tution, but at the end of the Civil War most of 
these extraordinary powers lapsed, from the cessa- 
tion of the circumstances which called them out ; 
and by 1871 reconstruction was practically ended, 
and thus another group of assailable acts ceased to 
have force. The legal tender issue was one of the 
few large extensions of national powers that con- 
tinued still to have the same influence in time of 
peace ; and Chase's effort was to restore that power 
also to ante-bellum conditions. Had he been able 
to carry with him a decided majority of the court, 
it is probable that the country would have acqui- 
esced ; but the division showed the powerful influ- 
ence on public life and private finances caused by 
the changes which had been brought about by the 
creation of the notes. 

The arguments in both the Hepburn and Legal- 
Tender cases were really less legal than political. 
Neither side was able to find a series of consistent 
precedents either in state or national decisions; 
and both majority and minority opinions consist in 
the first place of elaborate essays on the nature of 
government in general and especially on the fed- 
eral government, with appropriate quotations from 
Marshall's decisions ; and in the second place of 
long and often passionate arguments as to what was 
most expedient for the welfare of the country dur- 
ing the Civil War. It is noteworthy that both 
sides avoided the issue of treating the legal tenders 
as simply a war measure which ceased to have 



410 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

force when the war was over, but preferred to dis- 
cuss the nature of legal tenders as incidental to the 
regulation of the currency and to general financial 
powers. In dignity and logic the chief justice 
was superior to his opponents, and pointed out with 
clearness the danger of the principle, announced 
by the majority, that the government might per- 
form certain acts, because they were usual among 
sovereign powers. Throughout the discussion is 
evident also the curious feeling of the sanctity of 
legal tender notes, because they were supposed to 
have performed a great service in time of war. 
This was perhaps a result of the rising tide of 
demagogism in the country, which threatened to 
make wholly irredeemable the already depreciated 
paper notes, on precisely the ground stated by Jus- 
tice Bradley, — the comparison of " the poor man's 
cattle and houses " with " the rich man's notes and 
bonds." 

As to Chase's change of mind, his own state- 
ment in his two opinions is his best defense. Per- 
haps he might have said more; he might have 
urged that he was returning to the convictions of a 
lifetime, disturbed for the time being by the anxi- 
eties of his secretaryship. When the justices des- 
canted on the importance of the national currency, 
Chase could have replied that the permanent na- 
tional currency ought not to be, and was not in- 
tended to be, composed of government notes with 
the legal tender quality, but of national bank 
notes, which could do their work without any such 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 411 

support. That sober judgment which absolves 
Lincoln for his assumption of hitherto undreamed 
powers, and approves the progressive changes in 
his point of view towards both national and re- 
bellious governments, must also apply to Chase. 
In 1869 he saw results of his own action which 
he could not see seven years before. 

Yet his attitude on the legal tenders was unfor- 
tunate, both for his reputation and for the welfare 
of the country ; and his connection with the issue of 
the legal tenders put it out of his power to help in 
the restoration of the government to the sounder 
financial principles for which he was so ardent. 
His own honesty stood in his way, for he could not 
convince people that he had in 1862 assented to a 
measure really fraught with danger to the country; 
and when he found that he could count on but five 
judges out of eight, it would have been politic to 
proceed on the lines of the Bronson and Oregon 
cases, setting up all the limitations possible on 
the exercise of the power, but leaving the legal 
tenders where they were. Undoubtedly Chase's 
judgment was better in 1869 than in 1862 ; the 
country would have been better off if it had not 
insisted on the legal tender act ; and it would have 
been better off if it could have accepted the judg- 
ment of 1869 ; but that judgment was pronounced 
with an incomplete court, which in the nature of 
things must speedily be remodeled, and it would 
have been wiser not to provoke the issue of a 
reversal. 



412 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

The reputation and prestige of the court neces- 
sarily suffered from the sudden change of front, a 
change of which there has been but one subsequent 
instance. " The rehearing," said the " Nation " in 
1871, " on the first point, is an acknowledgment 
by the court of the soundness of the arithmetical 
view of its powers, e. g., that the claims of its 
decisions to popular respect depend for their valid- 
ity on the number of judges who concur in them. 
Considering that Congress has the right to increase 
the number of judges at pleasure, it is hardly short 
of suicidal for the court to give any countenance 
to the notion that nine judges have power which 
seven have not, or that a majority of three could 
give weight to a judgment which a majority of one 
could not give it. We therefore look on the 
reopening of the question of the applicability of 
the legal-tender act to contracts made before Feb- 
ruary, 1862, as a great misfortune." 

Chase's service on the Supreme Court was for 
many reasons onerous : the docket was long and 
the decisions many and intricate ; his circuit court 
business was also harassing, and his feeling of 
responsibility in public affairs kept him upon a 
continual strain. The contest over the legal tender 
decision in the spring of 1870 was especially try- 
ing, for it seemed to him an attempt to undo the 
most important service which the court had ren- 
dered the country. He was a man of strong and 
aggressive health, but he never spared himself or 
distributed his work so as to keep up his highest 



FINANCIAL AND LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS 413 

efficiency. In August, 1870, lie was seized with 
paralysis. Though the attack was severe, he gradu- 
ally improved, but was not able to take his place 
on the bench during the term of 1870-71. During 
1871 he spent a considerable part of his time in 
health resorts, east and west, and even contem- 
plated going abroad. He did, however, sit with 
the court during the terms of 1871-72 and 1872- 
73, and prepared many opinions, but he felt ex- 
hausted and would have been glad to retire 
altogether had the law given the privilege at an 
earlier age than seventy years. 

An evidence that he had lost his keenness of ob- 
servation and discrimination was his continued 
hope of the Democratic nomination in 1872. 
Many obscure correspondents during 1869, 1870, 
and 1871 assured him of their support, while 
Cassius M. Clay got twenty leading Democrats to 
agree to stand by him. Chase could no longer 
claim to be a Eepublican: he was much dis- 
appointed in General Grant, and would have been 
glad to aid in his defeat. In March, 1872, he 
pulled some wires for the Cincinnati Liberal Con- 
vention, and wrote in accustomed phraseology that 
he did not seek a nomination, but " if those who 
agree with me in principles think that my nomi- 
nation will promote the interests of the country, I 
shall not refuse the use of my name." When 
Greeley was nominated he announced his purpose 
of voting for him. " I am," he wrote, " as you are 
aware, a Democrat, separated in nothing from the 



414 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

Democrats of the Jackson and Benton school, 
except my convictions on the slavery question in 
times past, and now by nothing." 

In the spring of 1873 he appeared noticeably 
older and weaker ; though he felt great interest in 
the Slaughter House cases, he was not able to pre- 
pare a dissenting opinion. Indeed, he began to 
look forward to his end, and chose Judge Warden 
to be his biographer; in his hands he placed his 
most confidential journals and correspondence, and 
to him he talked freely about the events of his 
life. On May 6, 1873, a second shock of paralysis 
came upon him while in New York. He never 
recovered consciousness, and died, May 7, 1873, 
at the premature age of sixty-five. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE MAN 

Chase's public life has now been reviewed, and 
it remains to sum up the things which made him so 
strong a personality, so distinguished a man, and 
so important a statesman. In person he was one of 
the most striking men of his time. More than six 
feet tall, with a broad and majestic form, strongly 
carved and individual features, a keen eye, and re- 
solute although opinionated mouth, he always made 
an impression of strength, readiness, and power. In 
massiveness and appearance of reserve strength he 
is comparable with Webster, whom he somewhat 
resembled in feature. A little conscious of his 
own advantages of person, he was always careful 
to set them off with appropriate dress. In man- 
ner he was agreeable but never deferential. Most 
people who met him admired his incisiveness and 
force, but he did not hold back his opinions, and 
was not always considerate in expressing them. 
Among his own friends he was genial, and even 
warm-hearted and affectionate, but he had a strong 
sense of what was due him, and sometimes his tem- 
per got the better of his judgment, and he would 
break out into reproaches. He wrote a great deal 



416 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

with his own hand as well as through secretaries, 
and his handwriting, never remarkably legible, at 
last became difficult to read. He was methodical 
in his habits, but was too busy to hold himself 
to any routine, and his papers abound in journals 
and letter-books begun but not completed. 

Chase was always fond of building houses and 
laying out grounds, and in the course of his life 
owned four or five different houses : two in Cincin- 
nati, both of which were sources of expense long 
after he had ceased to occupy them ; the handsome 
house which he built in Columbus while gover- 
nor ; and finally his estate of Edgewood, about two 
miles west of the Capitol at Washington. This 
estate of fifty-five acres with a broad, old-fashioned 
house, crowning a hill, though it absorbed plenty 
of money for repairs and improvements, turned 
out in the end to have been one of the few good 
investments that he made. He took great plea- 
sure in planning and occupying it, and though not 
very far from the Capitol, it was at that time quite 
outside the city, and served him as a country resi- 
dence. 

Throughout his life Chase suffered inconvenience 
and loss because he could not make up his mind to 
turn into cash a sufficient part of his property to 
extinguish his debts. Some parts of his real estate 
he was unable to sell until his youngest daughter 
reached her majority, in 1865, inasmuch as she 
had an interest in it ; and it was not until about 
1867 that the sales of real estate in Cincinnati 



THE MAN 417 

and Brooklyn cleared him of long-standing debts. 
Then for a time he was prosperous. He had some 
railroad and telegraph stock which suddenly be- 
came valuable, and at one time he held in his pos- 
session marketable securities to the value of nearly 
•$50,000 ; but in his private finances he never was 
happy. On the advice of one of his oldest and 
shrewdest friends, Joshua Hanna, he put a little 
money into gold mining stock, with the usual re- 
sult that the stamp mill was always " just about to 
start up." 

Ever since his first days in the Treasury he had 
retained a warm personal friendship for Jay Cooke, 
the great Philadelphia banker, as well as for his 
brother, H. D. Cooke of Washington, who later 
became his executor. Jay Cooke made a large 
fortune, partly out of his extensive banking busi- 
ness, partly out of his deserved profits from the 
agency for the sale of government bonds, and 
partly through his interest in the Northern Pacific 
Railroad. For Chase's own finances this friend- 
ship was disastrous. He had several times pro- 
tested against offers of Mr. Cooke to enrich him 
against his will, and in 1868 declined to accept cer- 
tain stock which Cooke informed him had paid for 
itself through the simple process of charging Chase 
with the cost price of the securities and selling 
them out at an advance without his having fur- 
nished any money, given any directions, or assumed 
any responsibility. On this episode Chase wrote : 
" I shall never cease to be glad and grateful that I 



418 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

laid down for myself the rule, after Congress gave 
me such great powers, enabling me to raise and 
depress values very largely at my discretion, that I 
would have nothing to do, directly or indirectly, 
with speculations or transactions, in gold or securi- 
ties of any sort, for my own or anybody's private 
benefit." 

He did, however, accept Cooke's advice on cer- 
tain cash investments which proved profitable, and 
in December, 1869, turned over to him cash and 
cash securities to the value of $ 40,000, for which 
he took $50,000 of Northern Pacific bonds at 80, 
— they were then paying seven per cent. The 
investment was speculative and eventually proved 
a heavy loss, as did also an investment of 19000 in 
Potomac Ferry stock which the Cookes carried for 
him on their books for six years, till it had by in- 
terest charges accumulated to $14,000. Notwith- 
standing an excellent salary as chief justice and 
considerable revenues from his investments, the 
executors of the chief justice found little to show 
at the end of his eight years' service, except 
the estate of Edgewood. His daughters, however, 
both married men of property, and were not de- 
pendent upon him. 

One reason why Chase rarely had ready money 
was his generosity towards his poor relations. 
Year after year he sent money to certain pension- 
ers whose lot he raised out of misery into comfort. 
Throughout his early life brothers, sisters, nephews, 
and nieces looked to him for counsel, and some- 



THE MAN 419 

times for support; and lie was subject to many 
calls for charity and public subscriptions. 

Chase was a man of warm attachments, and in 
the twenty years that he lived a widower he suf- 
fered for the lack of his wife's companionship, 
sympathy, and counsel. Many people predicted 
that he would marry a fourth time ; and there were 
several ladies in whom he took a cautious interest, 
and one who was thought by his friends to be se- 
lected. His grown daughter was not likely to feel 
enthusiastic over a fourth marriage ; and when this 
lady came by invitation to visit at his house she 
did not find a warm atmosphere, and the visit was 
never repeated. He had little inclination to change 
his estate again, for so long as he lived his daugh- 
ters continued to be his greatest human interest 
and happiness. The attachment of the brilliant 
young Senator Sprague for Miss Chase became evi- 
dent soon after they went to Washington in 1861, 
and they were married in much state. Sprague 
was afterwards governor of Khode Island, was a 
warm supporter of Chase in his presidential aspi- 
rations, and cordially welcomed him to his home 
and his circle of friends in Ehode Island ; and it 
was for many years the custom of the secretary 
and of the chief justice to spend at least part of 
the summer at Narragansett Pier, though he was 
also fond of the White Mountains. His younger 
daughter, Nettie, was married, March 23, 1871, to 
Mr. W. S. Hoyt of New York, and both sisters 
remained not only attached to their father, but in 



420 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

close relations with him, and shared in his interests 
and his career. 

No account of Mr. Chase could be complete 
which ignored the remarkable connection of Kate 
Chase, later Mrs. Sprague, with her father's public 
life. Young, remarkably beautiful, regal, and cap- 
tivating, she made it her business in life to estab- 
lish cordial relations with his political friends, and 
she was a gracious hostess for the hospitality which 
her father enjoyed giving ; ambassadors, senators, 
and politicians were eager for her good-will and 
willing to promise her aid, and Mrs. Lincoln had 
battles royal with her for (as she said) coming to 
the receptions at the White House as a guest and 
holding court on her own account. She had a re- 
solute purpose to bring about her father's nomina- 
tion in 1864, and perhaps her influence held her 
father to his opposition to Lincoln. Indeed, this 
remarkable woman was generally considered to be 
a political force of magnitude, and she is the only 
woman in the history of the United States who has 
had such public influence. She felt keenly indig- 
nant with Lincoln for letting her father leave the 
Treasury, and jokingly accused Sumner on the day 
of the nomination of the chief justice of being in 
a plot to " shelve her father." The influence and 
spirit of his daughter again held Chase up to his 
strife for the presidency in 1868. She was virtu- 
ally his manager in New York, and competent 
judges have believed that had she been able to go 
into the convention and make her combinations on 
the spot she would have secured his nomination. 



THE MAN 421 

Within his family Chase unbent from that Jove- 
like serenity which distinguished him, and was 
an interesting and lovable man. Throughout his 
life he wrote frequently to his children with sym- 
pathy, interest, and good sense. His numerous 
kindred were welcomed to his house. Perhaps he 
needed a more robustious atmosphere ; perhaps his 
public life would have been freer from mistake had 
he lived more with other public men and been 
more subject to the virile criticism of less admiring 
associates. 

Chase was a man who cared very much for the 
favorable opinion of other people, and who loved 
to serve and advise his friends. He genuinely 
liked men and women, liked to be among them, 
liked to be well thought of by them ; and he had 
many devoted friends, especially among younger 
men. For instance, he enjoyed the cordial regard 
of the young, brilliant, and rising public man, 
James A. Garfield. He was pleased with the 
blunt, straightforward respect of men like Edward 
L. Pierce, with whom he was in correspondence 
for more than twenty years. From Major D wight 
Bannister, of Iowa, Chase received almost chivalric 
tokens of his interest, for he offered to throw up 
his profession that he might take care of Chase in 
his last illness. He had the power of attaching 
such men and making them lifelong correspond- 
ents, admirers, and political aids. 

To men more nearly of his own age and position 
in life Chase was less attractive. Upright, honor- 



422 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

able, kindly, accustomed from his birth up to asso- 
ciating with the best in the land, Chase yet seemed 
throughout his life unable to form warm friend- 
ships with other public men. In the galaxy of the 
great men of the Civil War period, his only inti- 
mate personal friend was Charles Sumner. John 
Jay, of New York, wrote often, and had a very 
cordial interest and respect for him, but they were 
seldom thrown together. Among his associates in 
the cabinet Chase had not one intimate friend, not 
even Stanton. In Congress Fessenden of Maine 
most nearly represented his views and became his 
worthy successor, but in the House in the crisis of 
the taxation, currency, and bank discussions, the 
only member of large influence who was personally 
attached to him seems to have been Ashley, and 
his championship was at that time of little service. 
Among the Republican war governors, not one was 
an ardent supporter of Chase at any time, and 
even in the Supreme Court there appears to have 
been no one with whom Chase was familiar ; while 
the coterie of leading Republican politicians, Ben 
Wade, Thaddeus Stevens, and the rest, were 
openly hostile to him. Though in abilities and 
reputation Chase surpassed all these men, his 
warmest and most devoted political friends were 
for the most part men who merged their political 
identity in his, and both in 1864 and 1868 he 
could not stir the levers through which public sen- 
timent works its will. Politically and even so- 
cially he was throughout a novus homo. Notwith- 



THE MAN 423 

standing his excellent social and professional start 
in Washington and Cincinnati he took a side in the 
anti-slavery contest which, in the minds of many- 
aristocratic people, set him among fanatics and 
persons of imperfect social instincts. To defend 
negroes, to appear before the Supreme Court as 
their champion, to tell them that they ought to 
have a ballot, was to create against himself that 
social prejudice which was felt in equal measure 
by Charles Sumner. 

Nor was Chase at any time in his life genuinely 
popular. He was submitted to an election by ballot 
but twice, in the Ohio campaigns of 1855 and 1857, 
and in the second of these contests his majority 
was very narrow. He had a certain Eoman aggres- 
sive virtue about him, a Cato-like consciousness of 
uprightness, which somehow vexed and repelled 
the ordinary voter, and was one reason for his lack 
of personal relations with other public men. But 
on the other hand, he had not the bonhomie, the 
power of putting himself in relations with the 
average man, which carried a man like Abraham 
Lincoln beyond all questions of social prejudice. 
Chase was a representative neither of the tradi- 
tional aristocratic classes nor of the laborer; and 
his splendid championship of the cause of the negro 
did little to endear him to the masses, yet gave him 
a radical reputation which did not commend him to 
the leaders. 

Few men leave behind them such minute memo- 
randa of their private lives as those which are open 



424 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

to the biographer of Chase. Mr. Warden knew 
no other use to make of the mass of his diaries 
and correspondence than to print the most private 
and sacred passages with the rest. But the char- 
acter of the man stands both the test of his printed 
journals and of his immense unpublished corre- 
spondence. He was by nature religious, not only 
maintaining the formal observances of religious 
worship in his family, but holding to the faith of 
the Christian. He was a man of sobriety of char, 
acter, whose jokes were clumsy, whose conversation 
was almost painfully decorous, and whose letters 
even to intimates, were stately and sometimes ob- 
viously intended for posterity. He was a truthful 
man from top to toe ; perhaps he was over-anxious 
to defend himself, to deprecate or forestall criti- 
cism; but deceit was not in him, and his worst 
enemies might accuse him of being too blunt, but 
not of an unworthy finesse. In the course of his 
life he knew much violent abuse, and was often 
accused of getting his senatorship by a political 
job, but the terms of the combination in the Ohio 
legislature of 1849 were known to everybody at 
the time, and involved no concealment nor dis- 
honesty. 

Chase was a man of varied interests, who always 
had many irons in the fire, and was harassed by 
the effort to keep them all hot; but he was a 
painstaking lawyer, a careful and considerate sen- 
ator, a hard-working secretary, and a thoughtful 
judge. Perhaps what he most lacked was health- 



THE MAN 425 

f ul pessimism ; lie had always too much preliminary 
confidence that everything was to be for the best, 
and a corresponding sinking of heart when his 
plans miscarried. His greatest fault was a life- 
long habit of self-introspection, to assure himself 
how upright were his purposes ; but his belief in 
himself does not lessen the truth that the roots of 
his private character were a strong sense of duty 
and a high standard of conduct. 

While the great variety of his life experiences 
did much to make Chase a broad and far-seeing 
man, it is unfortunate for his reputation as a jurist 
that he had so short a time of service on the 
bench, and allowed so much of his energies during 
that period to go into political and personal ques- 
tions. Chase had the foundations of great judicial 
eminence : as a lawyer he was industrious and pains- 
taking ; his mind had the habit of throwing aside 
unimportant things right and left, so that he might 
get at the essential questions ; he saw broad rela- 
tions, and at the same time had a power of dis- 
crimination which enabled him to apply effective 
precedents and to get rid of comparisons which were 
not really parallel. 

In judicial style Chase has little of Marshall's 
marvelous art of arrangement, and of luminous, 
unmistakable statement of great principles in a 
literary form. His opinions lacked method, and 
did not clearly reveal the progress of the argument 
in his own mind ; but his law was safe, conservative, 
and respectable, if never brilliant; and the deci- 



426 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

sions of the Supreme Court during his incumbency 
in general show consistency and an accretion of 
principles which harmonize with each other. 

The exact character of his influence on the Su- 
preme Court is difficult to determine, and little 
light is thrown upon it by the official tributes paid 
by his colleagues after his death. The reorganiza- 
tion of the court from 1865 to 1870 brought heart- 
burnings and some dissensions, although the pub- 
lic saw little of these troubles until the explosion 
over the legal tender decisions ; and in that crisis 
the pressure of the majority was resisted by Chase 
not very gracefully or graciously. Indeed, Chase's 
best judicial service was given in the four years 
from 1865 to 1869, while he was still in the fullness 
of his powers, and before the court stood before 
the country as a divided and disagreeing body. 
Chase's greatest opinion was that in the Texas v. 
White case, which shows such power of compressed 
historical statement and such application of great 
principles to the problems of the Civil War, that 
his admirers must wish that he had lived to render 
a series of such decisions, for in them he would 
have gone upon the roll of the greatest American 
jurists. Even in his brief experience his reputa- 
tion remains that of a sound, hard-headed, well- 
informed, well-trained jurist. He stands below 
Jay and Marshall and Story ; but in general quali- 
ties and services as a judge he has an honorable 
place among the judges who have sat upon the 
Supreme Bench. 



THE MAN 427 

Into his public life Chase carried the character- 
istics which marked his private life: the same 
sense of duty and the same optimism, tempered in 
later life by his own experience, the same restless 
spirit of hard work, the same application of a high 
standard. He was a great man, who would have 
left a greater impression upon his contemporaries 
had he been content to do one piece of work at a 
time, and to give to it his whole mind. His con- 
ception of public life was that of public service ; 
that he should have handled hundreds of millions 
of dollars without any part of it sticking to his 
fingers was hardly a subject for the self -congratu- 
lation which he bestowed upon it ; but it was an 
achievement to administer the Treasury during the 
Civil War without giving to any of his friends a 
hint which would have enabled them to make money 
in private speculation. His acts as a public ser- 
vant he understood to be for the public welfare. 
In the midst of a venal and corrupt period, when 
even some of his colleagues were suspected of put- 
ting good things in the way of their friends, Chase 
remained honest. He had an immense opportunity 
through his control of the border trade, and doubt- 
less permits to trade were often issued to inferior 
men ; but he intended that that difficult business 
should be honestly carried through, and was not 
more deceived than must have been the case with 
any administrator dealing with the seizure of pri- 
vate property in the midst of such turmoil. 

Chase had also the honesty of expressing unpop- 



428 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

ular opinions and adhering to them when it seemed 
likely to be to his own hurt. A few times in his 
life he shifted his beliefs, once when he went into 
the Liberty party in 1842, once when he changed 
ground on the question of resisting secession by 
force in 1861, and once on the constitutionality of 
legal tenders. But certainly the first and the third 
of these changes were likely to bring him nothing 
but ill-will and difficulty. For the great prize of 
the presidency, which always eluded him, he made 
long and astute preparations beforehand, but he 
was not at any time willing to change his opinions 
in order to win votes, nor to compel his subordi- 
nate officials to work for his political advancement. 
As a politician Chase lacked conciliation and 
alertness ; yet he did first and last win many votes 
for the measures and the men whom he supported. 
He was in large degree an opportunist. In the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, where his qualities as a man 
were perhaps more clearly revealed than in any 
other episode of his life, he did everything that 
could be done to modify the bill, except to give up 
the principles upon which his objection was founded. 
However strong his sense of his own judgment he 
was willing to yield in details, and to work with 
other men. If he yielded to Congress on the legal 
tenders, Congress yielded to him on internal reve- 
nue, on methods of collection, and especially on 
the national bank system; and as a constructive 
statesman Chase must ever stand among the great- 
est Americans. 






THE MAN 429 

Chase saw more clearly than any other public 
man of his time, except Lincoln, the importance, 
the necessity, and the moral effect of sticking to a 
consistent principle. He entered public life as an 
anti-slavery man, and nothing ever drew him aside 
from what he conceived to be the right of the bond- 
man, and the parallel right of the community to 
be freed from bondage. In this respect he stood 
far above William H. Seward, a man whose career 
was in many respects like his own. In the dark 
months of 1860 and 1861, both men were inclined 
to give up the strenuous opposition to secession, — 
Seward, because he believed the Southern States 
were not in earnest ; and Chase, because he could 
not at once see that the future freedom of the con- 
tinent depended upon striking at the Confederacy 
before it was completed. The national banking 
system was Chase's creation, and from 1861 to 
1864 he thought of it continuously, losing no op- 
portunity of showing how much it was needed ; 
and eventually his principles triumphed. Begin- 
ning with the conviction that the self-control of the 
States in their own concerns was necessary for free- 
dom in the North, Chase never divested himself of 
the belief that it was best to leave even the South- 
ern States after reorganization to manage their own 
affairs ; and at his death he stood on the great ques- 
tion of state rights about where he had stood thirty 
years earlier. Other men of his time had changed 
their minds, and Chase was not the man to be bound 
forever by a partial conception arrived at early 



430 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

in life ; his view was simply that it lay in the na- 
ture of man to misuse the powers of government 
if too much were assembled in the national part of 
the American system. 

Why is it that a man so large, so farsighted, so 
upright, whose principles were so excellent, should 
have failed to leave an impression of superem- 
inence ? One reason is that the times were not so 
favorable for the reputation of a civilian as of a 
military man ; but a still stronger reason is that 
Lincoln, in the public mind, so overtopped all 
other statesmen. There were plenty of striking 
civilians during the Civil War, and Chase came 
into relations with most of them ; but their repu- 
tations are all stunted by the greatness of that 
most overpowering personality. Charles Francis 
Adams, Stanton, Seward, Sumner, and Thaddeus 
Stevens, would all have shone more brightly in 
earlier or later times. They are the men with 
whom Chase is to be compared ; and not one of 
them has such claims to our admiration as he. 
A fierce and implacable radical in his younger 
days, Chase came to have a spirit of moderation, 
and a conception that there was possibly another 
side to the controversy, which could never enter 
into the minds of Sumner and Stevens. In breadth 
of view and insight into the conditions of the 
country he certainly surpassed Adams ; in balance 
and in power of working with other men as in- 
strumentalities Stanton was far his inferior ; and 
the whole course of the Civil War and Kecon- 



THE MAN 431 

struction showed that he had in his mind a basis of 
solid conviction which was lacking in the fiery, 
more astute, and genial Seward. 

The truth of this statement does not take away 
the fact that in his own lifetime Chase had fewer 
warm friends and admirers than almost any one 
of these rivals, and that somehow he repeatedly 
gave an impression of smallness in small matters, 
which dimmed his reputation. This came first of 
all from his measuring himself with Lincoln, and in 
that unhappy difference he did not show a great 
man's appreciation of another great man's character 
and personality. Little men, buzzing newspaper 
correspondents, disappointed candidates for office, 
and unsuccessful generals, might have been expected 
to carp at Lincoln's oddities of manner and slowness 
in making up his mind, but it was reasonable to 
expect a broader view and a loyal sympathy from 
a man like Chase, so closely associated with the 
President, so cognizant of the tremendous econo- 
mic and political difficulties which beset him. 

It is not a defense to say that for some years 
Chase thought that his own experience and long 
service as an anti-slavery man gave him a deeper 
insight than Lincoln possessed. In the crisis of 
1862 and the supreme effort of 1864 he ought to 
have taken his place as Lincoln's strongest and 
most generous supporter. That he did not is due 
to two defects in his make-up : he lacked a sense 
of proportion and he lacked imagination. It was 
not in him to see that in 1864 the question was 



432 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

not of military success, nor of putting at the head 
of affairs a man of great intelligence and good 
judgment, — that is, Chase himself, — but in unit- 
ing the country in its final, desperate effort under 
the headship of the one man who by that time 
could unite the country. Again, Chase's lack of 
humor put him out of relations with the President. 
They never understood each other ; Seward, though 
far inferior to Chase in the conduct of his own pub- 
lic business, and though a much weaker element in 
the relations of the administration to the country, 
could obliterate himself and be content to be a lieu- 
tenant of the greater man ; but Chase in his whole 
life could not learn the lesson of subordination. 
He never looked upon himself as under the direc- 
tions of the President ; he always considered Lin- 
coln to be only a primus inter pares, and his con- 
ception of the Lincoln administration was that it 
ought to be a collegiate body in which the strong 
intellects were to shape a majority. Had Chase 
shown towards Lincoln the kind of patriotic 
fidelity which General Sherman showed towards 
Grant, his name might have gone down linked 
indissolubly with that of the greatest American, 
instead of standing as a representative of discon- 
tent and protest against his president and his 
chief. 

Another reason for the disappointment which 
Americans have felt not only in Chase, but in all 
the leaders of the Civil War, both civil and mili- 
tary, is that we no longer realize the tremendous 



THE MAN 433 

task which settled down upon them. Lincoln 
was wise enough to write : " I have made mis- 
takes ; " and yet we feel impatience with the unsuc- 
cessful generals and the imperfect statesmen. This 
generation measures the last by results which 
the wisest throughout the world did not in that 
day foresee. It seemed simply common sense for 
foreign observers in 1861 to predict that the Union 
would be permanently divided by secession ; no 
American, North or South, was justified in con- 
fidence that the North could be united for a single 
year's campaign, until the firing upon Fort Sumter 
raised a storm of wrath and resistance ; and even 
then a large minority in the North was opposed to 
the war, and a small minority ventured to express 
its dissent. Is it reasonable to hold Chase and 
Seward and Stanton, Grant, Halleck, and Buell, 
Adams and Sumner, responsible because they could 
not look forward even half a year into the future ? 
A Napoleon could have broken up the Southern 
confederacy in three months, but he could not have 
organized the moral forces of the Union to remove 
the causes of secession and restore mutual respect. 
Whatever the defects of the American public 
system, it did bring to the front in the great crisis 
, of the slavery conflict those Americans who were 
best able to understand both their own country- 
men and the problems which had to be solved. 
So far as they failed, there were no others who 
could have better succeeded. 

" There is a glory of the sun, and a glory of the 



434 SALMON PORTLAND CHASE 

moon, and a glory of the stars, and one star differ- 
eth from another in glory." Let not Lincoln's sur- 
passing power to gather within his own mind the 
means and hopes and purposes of the American 
people dim our admiration for the men who sur- 
rounded him ! Of these men there may have been 
abler statesmen than Chase, and there certainly 
were more agreeable companions, but none of 
them contributed so much to the stock of Ameri- 
can political ideas as he, both before, during, and 
after the Civil War. At first an obscure member 
of a little group of anti-slavery politicians, he came 
to something like headship of that party in the 
campaign of 1848. He was the first efficient anti- 
slavery senator, and in his management of the 
opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill showed 
great qualities as a parliamentary leader. He 
came forward as secretary of the treasury in the 
midst of chaos, and made suggestions and de- 
veloped financial ideas which may have been im- 
perfect, but which were so clear and definite that 
Congress was compelled to adopt most of them. 
Almost single-handed he began the attack upon 
the sixteen hundred state banks which were the 
entrenched fortresses of a vicious system, and com- 
pelled both bankers and congressmen to accept a 
better scheme. More than any other man he seized 
upon the conditions of the Civil War as leading 
straight to the legal and political freedom of the 
negro, and to him more than to any one else is 
due that system of negro suffrage which he ad- 



THE MAN 435 

vocated, not because lie thought it was ideal, but 
because he saw no halfway place in giving to the 
negro his long-usurped rights. In his latest years 
he well used his opportunity to stand for the prin- 
ciple of limited powers, as against the conception 
of a sovereign legislature, both in the States and 
the Union. 

Chase could never have been a father of his 
country ; he was rather one of those elder brethren 
who freely suggest, criticise, and complain, and 
who by the rectitude of their own lives, and by 
their upholding of high standards, influence the 
children as they grow up. No man of his time 
had a stronger conception of the moral issues in- 
volved in the Civil War ; none showed greater 
courage and resolution ; none came nearer to doing 
the thing for which he existed. The underlying 
idea of his public life was to bring the law up to 
the moral standards of the country, and to make 
both moral standards and law apply to black men 
as well as to white men. He had ambitions which 
sometimes dimmed his understanding and led him 
into injustice, but his life was sincerely given to 
the service of his country. Lincoln was a keen 
knower of men, and nobody had better oppor- 
tunity to observe Chase's deficiencies ; and Lin- 
coln said of him : " Chase is about one and a 
half times bigger than any other man that I ever 
knew." 



436 



APPENDIX A 

SUMMARY OF THE NATIONAL 









1860-61 


1861-62 


Revenues. 


39,582,000 

892,000 
871,000 


49,056,000 
1,795,000 


Direct Tax 








Miscellaneous 


932,000 
152,000 




Total 


41,345,000 


51,935,000 


Payments. 

Ordinary civil expenses . . 

Army 

Navy 

Interest on debt 


26,947,000 

22,981,000 

12,429,000 

4,000,000 


24,511,000 

394,368,000 

42,675,000 

13,190,000 


Total 


66,357,000 


474,744,000 


Debt Outstanding. 
Funded Loans 6 per cent 
Funded Loans 5 per cent 
7-3/10 per cent Notes . 
Treasury Notes 




y 


June 30, 1861 

39,773,000 
30,483,000 

20,611,000 


June 30, 1862 

100,754,000 

30,483,000 

122,837,000 

2,849,000 

53,040,000 

96,620,000 

57,746,000 

49,882,000 










Temporary Deposits . . 
Certificates of Indebtednes 
Fractional and Postal Curre 


s 
sne 


Total 






90,867,000 


514,211,000 



The figures are in every case the nearest thousand to the full figures ; hence 
the totals do not always tally exactly with the items. 



APPENDIX A 437 

FINANCES, BY FISCAL YEAKS, 1860-1866 



1862-63 


1863-64 


1864-65 


1865-66 


69,059,000 

1,485,000 

37,185,000 

456,000 

3,047,000 

167,000 


102,316,000 

475,000 

94,822,000 

14,919,000 

47,511,000 

588,000 


84,928,000 

1,201,000 

188,897,000 

20,567,000 

32,978,000 

997,000 


179,047,000 

1,975,000 

248,333,000 

60,894,000 

67,119,000 

665,000 


111,399,000 


260,633,000 


329,568,000 


558,033,000 


27,470,000 

599,299,000 

63,211,000 

24,730,000 


35,024,000 

690,792,000 

85,733,000 

53,685,000 


59,024,000 

1,031,323,000 

122,568,000 

77,398,000 


59,909,000 
284,450,000 

43,324,000 
133,068,000 


714,710,000 


865,234,000 


1,290,313,000 


520,751,000 


June 30, 1863 
257,085,000 

30,483,000 
139,971,000 
895,000 
3,351,000 
387,644,000 
162,385,000 
156,784,000 

20,192,000 


June 30, 1864 
672,162,000 
102,509,000 
109,356,000 
168,750,000 
781,000 
431,179,000 

72,330,000 
160,729,000 

22,895,000 


June 30, 1865 
771,324,000 
200,634,000 
810,766,000 
236,213,000 
473,000 
432,687,000 

89,717,000 
115,772,000 

25,006,000 


June 30, 1866 

891,246,000 

198,800,000 

945,553,000 

162,584,000 

272,000 

400,619,000 

120,176,000 

26,391,000 

27,071,000 


1,098,790,000 


1,740,691,000 


2,682,592,000 


2,772,712,000 



The footing for June 30, 1866, is about 11 millions less than the official 
total, because the gold certificates were not included here. 



438 



APPENDIX B 



BANKS AND CURRENCY, 1860-1866 



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INDEX 



INDEX 



Abolitionists, begin as followers of 
Garrison, 36; different groups of, 
36, 37 ; obliged to struggle for free 
speech, 38 ; the name disavowed by 
Chase, 54, 55 ; denounce Chase, 55 ; 
Western ones less extreme than Gar- 
risonians, 56, 57 ; Garrisonian wing 
advises non-resistance, 85 ; Western 
wing practices political action, 85 ; 
cease to influence the country after 
1841, 103 ; what they did effect, 103 ; 
welcome secession, 199. 

Adams, Charles Francis, compared 
with Chase, 430. 

Adams, John Quincy, his last recep- 
tion as President described by Chase, 
8 ; visited by Birney in 1837, 52 ; re- 
fuses to be called an abolitionist, 55, 
92 ; plan for his nomination op- 
posed by Birney, 92 ; his suggestion 
as to power to abolish slavery re- 
vived in 1861, 255. 

Aldam, W., Jr., corresponds with 
Chase on slavery, 83. 

Allen, Charles, in House in 1849, 114. 

Allen, William, Democracic senator 
from Ohio, 104. 

Anderson, Major Robert, in command 
at Fort Sumter, 208. 

Anderson, , in fugitive slave 

case, 168. 

Anti-slavery movement in 1775-1830, 
34 ; early societies for, 35. 

Ashley, James M., political lieutenant 
of Chase, 159 ; on corruption in Ohio 
Republican officeholders, 161 ; pro- 
poses Lincoln in 1860 to counteract 
Bates, 182 ; urges impeachment of 
Johnson, 358 ; unable to aid Chase 
during war, 422. 

Bailey, Gamaliel, friend of Chase, 
aids Lane Seminary seceders, 40 ; 



typical Western abolitionist, 57 ; 
edits the "National Era," 61; on 
possible Republican candidates in 
1856, 160. 

Ball, Flamen, law partner of Chase, 
23, 26 ; given an office by Chase, 
219. 

Banks, N. P., candidate for Republi- 
can nomination in 1856, 160 ; again 
in 1860, 181 ; attempts of Chase to 
placate, 187 ; discourages enlistment 
of negroes, 272 ; corresponds with 
Chase, 295. 

Bannister, Dwight, on Chase's reasons 
for resigning from Lincoln's cabi- 
net, 302 ; his devotion to Chase, 
421. 

Barnburners, bolt Democratic ticket, 
96 ; their action at the Buffalo con- 
vention, 100. 

Barney, Hiram, political lieutenant of 
Chase in New York, 160 ; tries to 
win over Lincoln, 188 ; abandons 
Chase for Lincoln, 193 ; appointed 
collector of port of New York, 217, 
218 ; his enemies, 311 ; his removal 
pressed by Lincoln, 315 ; reports to 
Chase the demand for registerships 
in bankruptcy, 323. 

Bartlett, , editor of " Cincinnati 

Gazette," corresponds with Chase, 



Edward, candidate for Re- 
publican nomination in 1860, 182; 
reasons for his availability, 183; 
his candidacy dreaded by Chase, 
187 ; in Lincoln's cabinet, 212 ; de- 
mands opening of Mississippi to 
trade, 228 ; gives opinion in favor 
of constitutionality of legal tender, 
247. 
Beecher, Lyman, president of Lane 
Seminary, 39, 40. 



442 



INDEX 



Benham, Henry, corresponds with 
Chase, 214. 

Benton, Thomas H., opposes Nebraska 
bill, 138. 

Bigelow, John, editor of " Evening 
Post," corresponds with Chase, 62. 

Birney, James G., becomes an aboli- 
tionist, 44 ; establishes " Philan- 
thropist," 44, 45 ; mobbed in Cincin- 
nati, 45, 49 ; protected by Chase, 
50; his influence upon Chase's views, 
51 ; furnishes Chase with arguments 
in Matilda case, 51, 52 ; urges Chase 
to oppose annexation of Texas, 52 ; 
agrees politically with Chase, 57; 
suggests practicable methods of at- 
tacking slavery, 66; aids fugitive 
slave Matilda, 73 ; indicted, and de- 
fended by Chase, 74 ; leaves Cincin- 
nati, 84; suggests an anti-slavery 
political party, 85 ; nominated for 
President, 86 ; draws a slight vote, 
87 ; protests to Chase against nomi- 
nating Seward or Adams, 92 ; re- 
nominated for President, 92 ; re- 
ceives a small vote, 93 ; retires from 
public life, 95. 

Birney, William, on Birney's conver- 
sion of Chase to anti-slavery princi- 
ples, 51. 

Black, Jeremiah S., Attorney-General, 
agrees to abandon Oberlin rescue 
suits, 170. 

Blair, Frank P., proposes Fremont for 
candidate in 1856, 160; proposes 
Bates in 1860, 182 ; attacks Chase in 
Congress, 313. 

Blair, Montgomery, urges the relief of 
Sumter, 209, 210 ; represents border 
States in cabinet, 254 ; wishes to 
file protest against emancipation 
proclamation, yet favors emancipa- 
tion in theory, 269 ; candidate for 
chief justiceship, 320. 

Booth, Walter, in House in 1849, 114. 

Border States, support Union, 254 ; not 
affected by emancipation proclama- 
tion, 270. 

Boutwell, George S., Secretary of 
Treasury, 392; accused of conspir- 
ing to pack the Supreme Court, 399. 

Bradley, Joseph P., dissents in Slaugh- 
ter-house Cases, 381 ; question of his 



having been nominated to pack the 
Supreme Court, 400 ; urges reopening 
of legal tender cases, 402 ; his opin- 
ion in Hepburn and Griswold case, 
406, 410. 

Briggs, James H., works for Chase's 
nomination in 1860, 180 ; describes 
efforts in Chase's behalf to win over 
Lincoln, 187, 188. 

Brinckerhoff , Jacob, tells Chase of the 
hostility toward him of Ohio Whigs, 
194. 

Brooks, Judge, holds federal court in 
Virginia, 343. 

Brown, John, asks Chase for money, 
174, 175. 

Buchanan, James, elected President in 
1856, 161 ; agrees with Chase to com- 
promise Anderson fugitive case, 168; 
comments on defeat of Democrats 
in Pennsylvania, 178 ; his policy 
during secession movement, 198. 

Buffalo Free Soil convention, call for, 
97; election of delegates to, 98; 
organization of, 99 ; its character, 
enthusiasm, and determination, 99- 
101 ; deal in, between Barnburners 
and anti-slavery men, 100, 101 ; in- 
fluence of Chase in, 101. 

Burnet, Jacob, advises Chase to settle 
in Cincinnati, 13 ; on committee to 
advise Birney to abandon his paper, 
45. 

Bushnell, Horace, at founding of Ohio 
Anti-Slavery Society, 44. 

Busteed, Richard, holds federal court 
in Alabama, 343. 

Butler, Andrew P., attacks Chase in 
Senate, 123. 

Butler, Benjamin F., presents Van 
Buren's name to Buffalo convention, 
100. 

Butler, General Benjamin F., permits 
trade in cotton at New Orleans, 227; 
his corrupt reasons, 228; his "con- 
traband " theory supported by 
Chase, 257 ; enlists negroes, 272 ; 
corresponds with Chase, 295. 

Calhoun, John C, Chase's opinion of, 
in 1829, 10 ; calls slavery a positive 
good, 122. 

California formed as a State, 120 ; its 



INDEX 



443 



admission demanded by Chase, 
126. 

Cameron, Simon, influences Republi- 
can party policy more than Chase, 
177 ; candidate for nomination in 
1860, 181 ; his candidacy not re- 
garded seriously, 187, 188; his friends 
try to exclude Chase from Treasury, 
205 ; on good terms with Chase, 212, 
301. 

Campbell, John A., resigns from Su- 
preme Court, 324 ; his argument in 
Slaughter-house Cases, 382. 

Campbell, Lewis D., his career in Con- 
gress, 156. 

Campbell, R. , describes Weed's 

corrupt politics, 185-187. 

Canada, the refuge of negro fugitives, 
31. 

Carlisle, J. M., counsel in Latham's 
case, 403. 

Carrington, H. B., corresponds with 
Chase, 214. 

Cartter, D. K., political lieutenant of 
Wade in Ohio, 189. 

Cartwright, Peter, 4. 

Cass, Lewis, his nomination causes 
Barnburners' bolt in 1848, 96 ; his 
vote, 102 ; votes against excluding 
slavery from Territories, 129 ; disap- 
proves agitation, but supports Ne- 
braska Bill, 137 ; his friendly feel- 
ings for Chase, 168 ; arranges a com- 
promise in Anderson fugitive slave 
case, 168. 

Caswell, D. J., law partner of Chase, 
22. 

Catron, John, his death, 325. 

Channing, William E., his conference 
with Birney in 1837, 52. 

Chase, Dudley, uncle of S. P. Chase, 
2 ; advises him not to enter a gov- 
ernment clerkship, 6 ; brings Chase 
into Washington society, 7. 

Chase, Ithamar, father of S. P. Chase, 
2,3. 

Chase, Philander, uncle of S. P. Chase, 
3 ; takes Chase to Ohio, 3; his career 
as bishop, 4 ; president of Cincinnati 
College, 4 ; gives Chase letters of in- 
troduction in Washington, 6. 

Chase, Salmon P., his varied career, 1, 
2; birthplace, 2, 3; early schooling, 



3 ; life in Ohio with Bishop Chase, 3, 
4 ; returns to New Hampshire, 4 ; 
studies in Dartmouth College, 5; 
teaches school in Washington, 6 ; his 
social life in Wirt's family, 6-8 ; his 
esteem for Wirt, 7 ; describes draw- 
ing-room in Adams's administration, 
8 ; sees inauguration of Jackson, 9 ; 
comments on Jackson, 9 ; on Van 
Buren's responsibility for the spoils 
system, 9; on Randolph, Calhoun, 
and Webster, 10 ; gains social 
breadth, 11 ; studies law under 
Wirt, 11 ; admitted to the bar, 12 ; 
his attainments at this stage, 12 ; 
has low estimate of himself, 12. 

Lawyer in Ohio. Contrary to ad- 
vice, goes to Cincinnati to begin 
practice, 13 ; enters best local soci- 
ety, 16; gains practice slowly, 16, 
17 ; his reading habits, 17 ; aids in 
founding Lyceum, 17 ; writes period- 
ical articles, 17, 18 ; plans a Quar- 
terly Review, 18 ; compiles an edi- 
tion of Ohio laws, 18, 19 ; his 
opinions on the ordinance of 1787, 
19, 20 ; his first marriage, 20 ; his 
second marriage, 21 ; his third mar- 
riage, 21, 22 ; gains professional rep- 
utation, 22; his standing as a lawyer, 
22, 23 ; membership in various law 
firms, 23, 24 ; his influence over his 
law students, 24-26 ; exacts support 
from them, 25 ; not involved in many 
great cases, 26 ; loses connection 
with Bank of United States, 26 ; his 
debts and financial expedients, 27. 

Anti - slavery Leader in Ohio. 
Friendship with Dr. Bailey, 40 ; 
drafts an anti-slavery petition in 
1828 for some Quakers, 46, 47 ; oc- 
casionally shows dislike for slavery, 
47 ; does not notice early abolition- 
ist movements in Cincinnati, 48 ; his 
account of his intervention in behalf 
of Birney in 1836, 48-51 ; becomes 
an opponent of slavery, 50, 51 ; pro- 
bably converted by Birney, 51, 52 ; 
religious basis for his course, 52, 53 ; 
declines to be called an " abolition- 
ist," 54 ; denounces Garrison's 
views, 54, 55 ; difference between 
his opinions and Garrison's, 55, 56 ; 



444 



INDEX 



loses popularity in Cincinnati, 57 ; 
gains a greater general reputation, 
57, 58 ; speaks at anti-slavery meet- 
ings, 58; his characteristics as a 
speaker, 58, 59 ; successful in writ- 
ing addresses and resolutions, 59-61 ; 
aids local Liberty papers, 61 ; corre- 
sponds with leading editors, 62 ; be- 
comes leader of cause in Ohio, 62, 
63 ; his constitutional argument 
against slavery, 66-70 ; deduces anti- 
slavery argument from Jeffersonian 
democracy, 67, 68 ; fallacies in his 
historical argument, 69 ; his dubious 
position on slavery in the District of 
Columbia, 70 ; his constitutional ar- 
gument against the Fugitive Slave 
Act, 71 ; seldom enlarges on wrongs 
of slavery, 72 ; his career as defender 
of fugitive slaves, 73-82 ; in Matilda 
case, 73, 74 ; in Van Zandt case, 75- 
80 ; his theory of the Ordinance of 
1787, 77, 78 ; denounces Act of 1793, 

78, 79 ; significance of his argument, 

79, 80 ; in Watson case, 80 ; in Par- 
ish case, 80, 81 ; appealed to on be- 
half of slaves, 81, 82 ; given a silver 
pitcher by free negroes, 82 ; ap- 
proves negro suffrage, 83 ; called 
upon for advice from all quarters, 
83, 84 ; leads lonely life in Cincin- 
nati, 84. 

Organizer of Liberty and Free-Soil 
Parties. A National Republican in 
1832, 86 ; votes for Harrison in 1836, 
86 ; and in 1840, 87 ; joins Liberty 
party in 1841, 87 ; discussion of 
reasons for his change, 87-90 ; va- 
rious accounts of his dissatisfaction 
with Harrison, 87, 88 ; real rea- 
sons for his abandonment of Whig 
party, 89, 90 ; after 1840 never trusts 
Whigs, 90 ; his services in the Ohio 
Liberty party, 91, 92; disapproves 
Liberty platform of 1843, 92 ; con- 
siders Liberty party a failure and 
looks to the Democratic party, 94 ; 
discusses possible candidates in 
1847, 95; urges postponement of 
Liberty nomination, 95; declines 
nomination fop Vice-President, 96 ; 
issues call for Free Territory con- 
vention, 96 ; urges Hale to withdraw, 



96; engineers proceedings of the 
Free Territory convention, 97 ; looks 
upon Barnburners' movement as 
likely to purify the Democratic 
party, 97 ; his influence before the 
Buffalo convention, 98 ; favors Mc- 
Lean for nominee, 98; presides 
over committee of conferrees at 
Buffalo, 100 ; drafts resolutions, 101; 
agrees with Barnburners to secure 
Van Buren's nomination, 101, 102 ; 
in campaign of 1848, 102. 
United States Senator. Expects 
Free-Soilers to force Democrats to 
join them, 104 ; describes his part in 
the Ohio legislative contest of 1848- 
49, 106-109; accuses Whig Free- 
Soilers of bad faith, 109 ; exonerates 
Giddings, 109 ; accused of having 
entered Senate by a corrupt bargain* 
109 ; practically secures his election 
by aiding Democrats in Hamilton 
County question, 109 ; honest in his 
position favoring the Democrats, 
110 ; arranges repeal of Black Laws 
and drafts bill, 110 ; approves a di- 
vision of offices with Democrats, 
111 ; asserts his entire freedom from 
bargains or pledges, 112 ; his view of 
his position on entering Senate, 112; 
his first attack on slavery, 113; his 
opinions of Seward and Hale, 113 ; 
his other Free-Soil colleagues, 113, 
114 ; excluded by South from com- 
mittees, 114 ; later, gains consider- 
ation, 115 ; considers himself a 
Democrat, 115 ; does not fear disrup- 
tion of the pai'ty, 115, 116 ; his gen- 
eral conduct as senator, 116 ; urges 
improvements in Ohio, 116 ; urges 
homestead system, 117 ; disapproves 
excessive grants to railroads, 117 ; 
attitude on Pacific railroads, 118; 
opposes extravagance in paying 
claims, 118 ; opposes new federal 
buildings and increased salaries, 
119 ; reserves strength for slavery 
struggle, 119 ; his early speeches in 
1850, 123 ; avoids controversy with 
Butler, 123 ; prepares to attack 
Clay's compromise, 124; on Web- 
ster's 7th of March speech, 124 ; his 
relations with Seward, 125 ; bis 



INDEX 



445 



speech on the compromise, 125-128; 
defies the South to dissolve the 
Union, 128 ; defeated on motion to 
exclude slavery from Territories, 
129 ; refuses to accept the compro- 
mise, 129, 130 ; on the Fugitive 
Slave Law, 130 ; denounced by Doug- 
las, 131 ; attempts to build up " Free 
Democracy," 131 ; supports Demo- 
cratic ticket in Ohio against Free- 
Soilers, 131 ; rejoins Free-Soil party 
in 1852, 132 ; not reelected to Sen- 
ate, 133 ; does not expect revival of 
slavery struggle, 133 ; his part in 
the Kansas-Nebraska debate, 134 ; 
his early opinion of the chances of 
passing the bill, 137, 138 ; drafts 
" appeal of the Independent Demo- 
crats," 138-141; accuses Douglas 
of a trick, 141 ; called a liar by 
Douglas, 142 ; his reply, 143 ; pro- 
poses amendment to permit a legis- 
lature to prohibit slavery, 144 ; out- 
done in debate by Douglas, 145 ; his 
last speech on the bill, 146, 147 ; 
predicts a disruption of parties, 147 ; 
summary of his career in the Sen- 
ate, 148. 

Governor of Ohio. Plans to organ- 
ize a new party in Ohio, 151 ; con- 
tinues to expect a new Democratic 
party, 151 ; considers Anti-Nebraska 
movement a coalition, 152 ; from 
beginning opposes Know-Nothings, 
153 ; nominated by Republicans for 
governor of Ohio, 154 ; attempts to 
get him to trim, 154 ; his share in 
campaign, 155 ; elected by a close 
vote, 155 ; not the man to make a 
popular governor, 157 ; his state- 
ment of his own services, 157, 158 ; 
reforms militia service, 158 ; urges 
state improvements, 158 ; his presi- 
dential aspirations, 159 ; handi- 
capped by lack of political lieuten- 
ants, 159 ; lacks personal friends, 
160 ; his efforts to secure nomina- 
tion, 160, 161 ; his name withdrawn 
by Hoadly, 161 ; his connection 
with Gibson's defalcation, 161, 162 ; 
nominated and elected governor in 
1857, 162 ; acknowledged leader of 
new party, 163; in Rosetta slave 



case, 165, 166 ; his action in the Gar- 
ner slave case, 166, 167 ; later, de- 
fends his cautious action, 167 ; in 
the Anderson case, 168 ; agrees with 
Cass and Buchanan to have suits 
dropped, 168 ; announces purpose to 
assert state rights, 169 ; prevents 
violence in Oberlin rescue case, 
169 ; aids and counsels Kansas free- 
state men, 171 ; urges Governor 
Grimes of Iowa to act, 172 ; suggests 
that Ohio intervene to secure ingress 
of its citizens to Kansas, 172 ; pre- 
pared to disregard the Supreme 
Court if pro-slavery, 173 ; advises 
the acceptance and later modifica- 
tion of the Lecompton constitution, 
173 ; disapproves of a Republican 
coalition with Douglas, 174; sub- 
scribes to aid John Brown, 174 ; de- 
nies complicity in Brown's raid, 175; 
defies Wise's threat of invading 
Ohio, 175; his governorship occu- 
pied with slavery interests, 176 ; 
the leading anti-slavery man in the 
Republican party, 177. 

Candidate for Presidency. Begins 
to canvass for the Republican nom- 
ination, 178 ; asks his friends for as- 
sistance, 179 ; his leading support- 
ers, 180; takes part in Illinois 
campaign of 1858, 180 ; reelected to 
the Senate, 181 ; damaged as a can- 
didate by his tariff views, 181 ; feels 
sure of unanimous support of Ohio? 
182 ; unpopular with Whigs, 183 ; 
on corruption of New York politics, 
185 ; his opinion of his rivals, 187, 
188 ; loses delegates in Ohio, 189 ; 
declines to bribe, 190; his support 
at the Republican convention, 191, 
192 ; fails to secure unit rule for 
Ohio, 193 ; congratulates Lincoln on 
his nomination, 195 ; reasons for his 
failure, 195 ; wishes to avoid vio- 
lence, but maintain the Union, 200 ; 
his claims for a cabinet position, 
202 ; offered Treasury Department 
by Lincoln, 203 ; warns Seward 
against concession, 203; his action 
in the peace conference, 204; in- 
trigues to keep him out of cabinet, 
205; reasons for his appointment, 



446 



INDEX 



206 ; hesitates to accept nomination, 
206. 

Secretary of Treasury. Does not 
foresee his difficulties, 207 ; does not 
expect to control Lincoln, 207 ; op- 
poses provisioning of Sumter, 209; 
willing to recognize seceded States, 
209, 210; later, advises relieving 
Sumter, 210 ; assumes military du- 
ties on outbreak of war, 211; frames 
Orders 15 and 16, 212 ; keeps on 
good terms with Cameron, 212 ; rep- 
resents the West in the cabinet, 212 ; 
his supervision of Western move- 
ments, 212, 213 ; corresponds with 
generals, 214 ; appealed to for fa- 
vors, 214 ; demands a share of the 
diplomatic places, 214 ; urges return 
of Mason and Slidell, 215 ; begins to 
reorganize the Treasury, 215 ; his 
policy regarding new appointments, 
216-219; reappoints a few officials, 
217 ; appoints a friend to the collec- 
torship of New York, 217 ; appealed 
to for spoils, 218; appoints none but 
Republicans or War Democrats, 219; 
not interfered with by Lincoln, 219 ; 
employs women as clerks, 220; 
makes new loans, 221 ; proposes to 
Congress new loans and taxes, 221 ; 
his relations with bankers, 222 ; 
obliges them to take up Treasury 
notes by threat of suspension, 222, 
223 ; Lis subsequent loans in 1861, 
223 ; his relations with McClellan, 
224 ; confines his interest more to 
the Treasury, 224 ; expects revenue 
from confiscations, 224; manages 
seizure and sale of confiscated pro- 
perty, 225 ; regulates commerce to 
prevent trade with the South, 225- 
229 ; tries to check corruption in 
agents, 228 ; opposes opening Missis- 
sippi River to trade, 228 ; his diffi- 
cult situation in December, 1861, 
230; refuses to aid state banks to 
maintain their notes, 230, 231 ; una- 
ble to compel public confidence, 231 ; 
his course discussed, 232, 233 ; his 
plans ignored by Congress, 234 ; not 
able to manage Congress, 234; lacks 
supporters in Congress, 235; unable 
to predict expenditures, 235 ; his 



first report of 1861, 236; reluctant to 
advise taxation, 236, 237 ; prefers 
loans, 237 ; proposes a banking sys- 
tem, 238 ; secures passage of new 
taxes, 238 ; advantages of his plan 
over that adopted, 240 ; issues vari- 
ous forms of Treasury notes, 241, 
242 ; fails to secure good terms for 
the " five-twenty " bonds, 243 ; em- 
ploys Jay Cooke as general agent, 
244 ; annoyed by wild suggestions, 
245 ; willing to rely on demand notes 
without legal tender, 246; tries to 
prevent issue of legal tender notes, 
247, 249; fails to protest on passage 
of legal tender act, 247 ; yields to 
general demand for legal tender, 
250, 251 ; does not foresee the over- 
issue of notes, 251 ; does not foresee 
effect on gold, 252 ; represents anti- 
slavery element in the cabinet, 253 ; 
defends Lincoln's action in annul- 
ling Fremont's emancipation order, 
256 ; suggests employment of fugi- 
tive slaves in the war, 257 ; takes 
measures to benefit refugees, 259 ; 
aids fugitives on Sea Islands, 260; 
opposes Lincoln's colonization ideas, 
261 ; tries to prevent revocation of 
Hunter's proclamation, 262 ; looked 
to by abolitionists to influence the 
President, 263 ; predicts emancipa- 
tion even at cost of slave insurrec- 
tion, 264; urges a proclamation, 
264-266 ; describes in his diary Lin- 
coln's reading of proclamation to 
cabinet, 266-269 ; promises to sup- 
port this policy, 268 ; makes sugges- 
tions for final draft of emancipation 
proclamation, 270; urges abolition 
in border States, 271 ; supervises 
freedmen, 271 ; urges enlistment of 
negroes, 272 ; suggests universal suf- 
frage in reconstruction on an edu- 
cational qualification, 272 ; distrusts 
state banks as federal agents, 275 ; 
early suggests a tax on bank notes, 
276 ; urges a federal banking system 
in 1861, 276, 277 ; secures Lincoln's 
aid, 278 ; fails to induce state banks 
to use first bank act, 279 ; suggests 
compelling state banks to take fed- 
eral charters, 280; proposes a new 



INDEX 



447 



bill which at first fails, 280, 281; his 
plan carried out after his retire- 
ment, 282 ; his credit for the mea- 
sure, 282, 283; mortified at depre- 
ciation of legal tender notes, 283 ; 
attempts to explain it, 283 ; accuses 
bank issues of inflation, 284 ; fails to 
introduce legal tenders in California, 
284 ; attempts to reduce premium by 
selling gold, 285 ; proposes bill to 
punish gold speculation, 286 ; his 
resignation not connected with the 
repeal of the bill, 287 ; estimate of 
his services as secretary, 287-289 ; 
his difficulties, 287, 288 ; his plans 
hampered by Congress, 288 ; shows 
short-sightedness in dealings with 
legal tender, 288, 289 ; his persist- 
ence and honesty, 289 ; fails to be- 
come intimate with Lincoln, 290; 
does not sympathize with Lincoln's 
humor, 291 ; left full authority by 
Lincoln in his department, 291 ; his 
attitude toward slavery contrasted 
with Lincoln's, 291, 292 ; more of a 
party man than Lincoln, 292 ; tries 
to interfere in military matters, 292; 
complains to Stanton of wasteful- 
ness, 293 ; disappointed at Lincoln's 
failure to consult with the cabinet, 
293, 294 ; suggests military move- 
ments, 294 ; joins rest of cabinet in 
trying to force McClellan's dis- 
missal, 294 ; corresponds with army 
officers, 295-297 ; favors McDowell 
and Pope, 296 ; seeks friendship 
with Hooker, Rosecrans, and Grant, 
296, 297 ; questionable appearance of 
his conduct, 297 ; writes in criticism 
of the administration, 298, 299 ; his 
failure to understand the situation, 
299, 300 ; disapproves of military 
government, 300, 301 ; remains on 
good terms with Stanton, 301 ; at 
first a rival of Seward, 301 ; agrees 
with Seward to resign in 1862, 302 
his reasons, 302, 303 ; slow to with 
draw his resignation, 303 ; sendi 
Lincoln explanatory letters, 304 
demands right to nominate treasury 
officials without dictation of sena- 
tors, 305 ; threatens to resign, 305 ; 
protests against Lincoln's removal 



of Smith, 305, 306 ; won over by Lin- 
coln, 306, 307 ; not disobedient or 
presumptuous, 308 ; tries to heal 
dissensions in Ohio, 309 ; begins to 
hope for nomination in 1864, 309 ; 
states his intention to be fair to Lin- 
coln, 310 ; wishes to be candidate of 
the war Democrats, 310 ; refuses to 
use Treasury patronage to aid his 
canvass, 311; publicly recommended 
by the Pomeroy Circular, 312 ; 
apologizes to Lincoln and offers 
to resign, 312 ; attacked by the 
Blair brothers in Congress, 313 ; 
enraged on learning of Blair's ap- 
pointment in the army, 314 ; with- 
draws from the canvass, 314 ; grows 
irritable, 315 ; again threatens re- 
signation over a question of patron- 
age, 315 ; has difficulties over the 
position of assistant treasurer, 316 ; 
again offers resignation, 317; sur- 
prised at Lincoln's acceptance of it, 
317 ; his comments, 317, 318. 

Chief Justice. His early interest in 
the Supreme Court, 319 ; hints to 
Lincoln that he would like to suc- 
ceed Taney, 319 ; ignorant of Lin- 
coln's intention to nominate him, 
320 ; his opinion of Evarts's merits, 
320 ; opposition to his nomination, 
321 ; nominated and confirmed by 
the Senate, 321 ; thanks Lincoln, 
321 ; his fitness for the bench, 322 ; 
his court patronage, 322, 323 ; finds 
Supreme Court in a depressed con- 
dition, 323 ; doubts his chance to aid 
in reconstruction, 328 ; opposes Lin- 
coln's theory of reconstruction, 330; 
criticises his amnesty proclamation, 
331 ; favors negro suffrage, 331, 335, 
339 ; visits South in 1865, 334; favors 
Freedman's Bureau, 337 ; does not 
take part in reconstruction contro- 
versy, 337 ; alienated from Johnson, 
339 ; approves Civil Rights Act, 340; 
suggests Fourteenth Amendment, 
340, 341 ; refuses to hold court in 
districts under military government, 
343 ; holds court in South Carolina, 

343 ; has controversy with Sickles, 

344 ; dissents from opinion in Milli- 
gan Case, 345 ; dissents in Cummings 



448 



INDEX 



Case, 347 ; and in Garland Case, 
348; gives decision annulling ap- 
prentice act in Maryland, 351 ; re- 
fuses to allow prosecution of Davis 
for treason, 352, 353 ; declares Da- 
vis free under Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, 353 ; value of his action, 354 ; 
prevents consideration of recon- 
struction acts, 356 ; presides over 
impeachment of Johnson, 358-361 ; 
disapproves of the impeachment, 
358 ; insists upon the Senate sitting 
as a court, 359 ; decides on admis- 
sibility of evidence, 359 ; votes to 
break a tie, 360 ; denounced by radi- 
cals, 360 ; surprised at Johnson's 
escape, 360 ; his conduct creditable, 
360 ; continues to consider himself 
a candidate for the presidency, 361 ; 
finds judicial office uninteresting, 
361 ; effect of his ambition on his 
career, 362 ; expects Republican 
nomination in 1868, 362; opposes a 
military candidate, 362 ; his secret 
canvass, 363; recognizes hopeless- 
ness of opposition to Grant, 363 ; de- 
sires Democratic nomination, 364 ; 
his grounds of opposition to the Re- 
publican programme, 364; his ap- 
parent inconsistency in joining a 
party opposed to negro suffrage, 365; 
elements of strength in his position, 
366 ; declares himself a Democrat, 
366; announces his policy toward 
the South, 367 ; has no strong sup- 
porters in the Democratic conven- 
tion, 367; fails to be nominated, 368; 
reasons for his failure, 368 ; remains 
statesman as well as judge, 369 ; 
defends negro suffrage, 369, 370 ; 
wishes universal amnesty, 371 ; 
doubts wisdom of Fifteenth Amend- 
ment, 371; assists in securing its 
ratification, 372 ; dislikes centraliza- 
tion resulting from the war, 372; 
admits a negro to bar of Supreme 
Court, 373 ; dissents from opinions 
of court enforcing payment on slave 
contracts, 373 ; on the status of the 
Confederate States Government, 
375 ; dissents in TarbelVs Case, 377 ; 
writes opinion in Texas v. White, 
378 ; his doctrine of the effects of 



secession, 378, 379 ; in White v. Hart 
approves the reconstruction policy, 
380 ; asks circuit judges to allow Su- 
preme Court to pass on Civil Rights 
Bill, 381 ; dissents from decision in 
Slaughter-house Cases, 381, 382 ; his 
opinion in Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 
386, 387 ; while secretary, stands as 
defender of legal tender acts, 389 5 
later, urges speedy resumption, 390; 
deplores continuance of legal tender 
act in time of peace, 392 ; begins to 
consider possibility of disallowing 
legal tender, 393 ; his opinion in 
Hepburn v. Griswold, 394-396 ; ac- 
cuses Grant of reorganizing court so 
as to reverse decision, 399 ; protests 
against rehearing of legal tender 
cases, 402, 403 ; his dissenting opin- 
ion, 407, 408, 410 ; reasons for his 
change of mind since 1862, 410 ; his 
action unfortunate, 411 ; suffers in 
health from judicial labors, 412; at- 
tacked by paralysis, 413 ; ready for 
Democratic nomination in 1872,413; 
last illness and death, 414. 
Personal Characteristics. Personal 
appearance, 415 ; self-importance, 
415; fondness for building, 416; slow 
to pay his debts, 416 ; prospers from 
railway and telegraph stock, 417 ; 
makes unfortunate investments at 
Jay Cooke's suggestion, 417, 418; 
generous to poor relations, 418 ; ex- 
pected to marry a fourth time, 419 ; 
his relations with his son-in-law, 
419; interest of his daughter in his 
political ambitions, 420; his private 
life, 421 ; his friendships, 421 ; has 
few friends among leaders, 421, 422; 
his enemies, 422 ; suffers from anti- 
negro prejudices, 423 ; lacks ele- 
ments of popularity, 423 ; his diaries, 
423 ; his religious nature, 424 ; his 
honesty, 424 ; misled by self-esteem 
and optimism, 424, 425; his standing 
as a judge, 425, 426 ; his masterpiece 
in Texas v. White, 426 ; his industry 
devoted to too many objects, 427 ; 
his incorruptibility in the Treasury, 
427 ; not afraid to change his views 
to his own hurt, 428 ; in politics, al- 
ways practical, 428 ; stands consist- 



INDEX 



449 



ently for anti-slavery principles, 
429 ; favors national banking system 
continuously, 429 ; adheres always 
to state rights, 429 ; fails to gain 
greater reputation because of Lin- 
coln's preeminence, 430 ; gains mod- 
eration and breadth superior to 
Seward and Adams, 430 ; makes 
mistake of measuring himself with 
Lincoln, 431 ; his error in aban- 
doning Lincoln in 1864, 431 ; unable 
to subordinate himself, 432 ; final 
summary of his career, 434, 435. 
Political Opinions. Abolitionists, 
50, 54-56 ; anti-slavery programme, 
59-61, 68, 92, 125, 176; appointments 
to office, 9, 157, 216-219, 304, 306 ; 
banks, national and state, 251, 276- 
283, 383, 387 ; cabinet, 293, 294, 304; 
Civil Rights Act, 340 ; coercion in 
1861, 200, 203-205, 209, 210, 429; 
colonization, 261 ; Compromise of 
1850, 124, 126, 130; Constitution and 
slavery, 68-70, 78, 126 ; Confederate 
government, 375, 376 ; democracy, 
67, 68, 366 ; Democratic party, 90, 
91, 94, 95, 97, 104, 112-115, 131, 132, 
151, 152, 364, 366, 413 ; District of 
Columbia, abolition in, 46, 70, 126 ; 
emancipation, 256, 262, 265,266, 268, 
271 ; Fourteenth Amendment, 341, 
382; freedmen, 259, 271, 331, 337 ; 
free speech, 47 ; Fugitive Slave Law, 
71, 74, 77-80, 126, 130, 165,467-170 ; 
habeas corpus, suspension of, 300, 
345, 377 ; impeachment, 358-361; in- 
ternal improvements, 101, 116, 118 ; 
judiciary, 319 ; Kansas, 171-173 ; 
Know Nothings, 153, 154; legal ten- 
der notes, 245-249, 283-286, 389, 392- 
396, 407-411 ; Nebraska BUI, 133, 137, 
139-141, 144 ; negro soldiers, 262, 
264, 272 ; negro suffrage, 272, 273, 
332, 336, 339, 364, 366, 370-372 ; 
ordinance of 1787, 19, 77; public 
debt, 221 ; public lands, 117 ; presi- 
dency, ambition for, 159-161, 178- 
196, 309-314, 361-363, 413; recon- 
struction, 330, 331, 339, 340, 343, 
347, 356, 371, 372, 380 ; Republican 
party, 151, 153, 162, 174,308, 364; 
slavery, 47-53, 72, 176, 291, 373, 429; 
tariff, 101, 181, 237 ; taxation, 236- 



238; Trent affair, 215; treason of 
Jefferson Davis, 352, 353; Union, 
nature of, 378, 379 ; veto power, 20 ; 
war, conduct of, 297-300, 302 ; war 
finances, 230-233, 235-237, 241, 242, 
387, 388; Whig party, 86-90, 97; 
Wilmot proviso, 127-129. 

Cincinnati, Southern elements in, 14 ; 
social life in, 16 ; riots in, against 
negroes, 31 ; mobs in, against the 
" Philanthropist," 45, 46, 49, 50. 

Cincinnati College, studies of Chase 
at, 4. 

Cisco, John J., retains office of assist- 
ant treasurer at Chase's and Lin- 
coln's request, 217, 222 ; urges issue 
of legal tender, 250 ; resigns his 
office, 315 ; persuaded to withdraw 
resignation, 316. 

Clay, Cassius M. , suggests Democratic 
nomination of Chase in 1872, 413. 

Clay, Henry, relations with Chase in 
1829, 7 ; alienates anti-slavery men 
in 1844, 93; Chase's opinion of his 
compromise resolutions, 124 ; calls 
Chase an abolitionist, 131. 

Clifford, Nathan, member of Supreme 
Court during war, 325. 

Cobb, Howell, his management of 
Treasury, 220. 

Coffin, Levi, agent of Underground 
Railroad in Ohio, 39 ; typical West- 
ern abolitionist, 57. 

Colby, Isaac, brother-in-law of Chase, 
49. 

Colfax, Schuyler, favors Douglas for 
Republican candidate, 180 ; suggests 
regulating depreciation of notes by 
law, 285. 

Colonization urged by Lincoln, 261. 

Compromise of 1850, struggle over, 
124-129 ; passed because of death of 
Taylor, 129. 

Congress, its policy in recognizing 
slavery, 46, 69, 70 ; its power over 
slavery in Territories, 127 ; passes 
Nebraska Bill, 146 ; efforts in, to 
compromise in 1860, 200-202 ; mem- 
bers of, insist on dictating appoint- 
ments, 218 ; grants loans and taxes 
in 1861, 221,222; passes confiscation 
acts, 224, 225 ; postpones financial 
legislation, 234 ; led by radicals, ina- 



450 



INDEX 



bility of Chase to control, 234, 235 ; 
raises tariff, 238, 239 ; adopts new 
internal taxes, 239 ; passes legal 
tender act, 246 ; passes Crittenden 
resolution, 254 ; passes emancipation 
acts, 257, 258 ; passes act to arm 
negroes, 263 ; rejects Chase's bank 
scheme, 277 ; passes national bank 
acts, 279, 282 ; passes and repeals 
♦'Gold Bill," 286; authorizes sus- 
pension of habeas corpus, 327 ; passes 
early acts in behalf of negroes, 336, 
337, 340 ; adopts Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, 340, 341 ; passes reconstruc- 
tion acts, 341, 342 ; prevents ap- 
pointments by Johnson to Supreme 
Court, 342 ; proposed attack of, on 
Supreme Court, 354, 355 ; removes 
McCardle Case from its jurisdiction, 
355 ; impeaches Johnson, 357-361 ; 
passes second Civil Rights Act, 381 ; 
favors contraction of currency, 390, 
391; limits contraction, 391; orders 
reissue of legal tenders, 391 ; pledges 
faith to redeem notes, 391. 
Constitution, in relation to slavery, 63, 
65-67 ; appealed to in all arguments, 
66 ; Chase's historical argument as 
to its anti-slavery character, 68, 69 ; 
Chase's argument on, in Van Zandt 
case, 78 ; its position on slavery in 
Territories, 127 ; opinion of Attor- 
ney-General on legal tender, 247 ; in 
relation to emancipation proclama- 
tion, 271 ; discussion over right to 
suspend habeas corpus, 300, 301 ; 
cases involving, during Civil War, 
326 ; Merryman Case, 326, 327 ; in 
Cummings and Garland Cases, 346- 
348 ; in relation to Maryland appren- 
tice law, 351 ; Fifteenth Amendment 
to, 371, 372 ; in White v. Hart and 
Osborn v. Nicolson, 373, 374 ; in 
cases on nature of Confederate Gov- 
ernment, 375-377 ; in Texas v. White, 
on nature of secession, 378-380 ; in 
White v. Hart, on reconstruction, 
380 ; in Slaughter-house Cases , on 
Fourteenth Amendment, 381-383 ; 
cases upholding taxing power of 
United States, 385-388 ; early cases 
on legal tender in state courts, 389 ; 
early cases on legal tender in Su- 



preme Court, 393 ; in Hepburn v. 
Griswold, 394-397 ; in Legal Tender 
Cases, 404-408. 

Cooke, H. D., Chase's executor, 417. 

Cooke, Jay, has success in distributing 
treasury notes, 223 ; appointed gen- 
eral agent for placing U. S. bonds, 
244 ; tries to induce New York edi- 
tors to favor Chase's bank bill, 279 ; 
tries to benefit Chase and induces 
him to make poor investments, 417- 

Corwin, R. C, asks Chase's advice 
about aiding a fugitive slave, 81. 

Corwin, Thomas, his success as a 
speaker, 58, 156. 

Cotton, smuggling of, during war, 227, 
228. 

Court of Claims, its creation favored 
by Chase, 118. 

Cox, Jacob D., studies law under 
Chase, 25. 

Cranch, William, reluctant to admit 
Chase to the bar, 11, 13. 

Crothers, Samuel, early abolitionist in 
Ohio, 38. 

Curtis, George T., remonstrates to 
Chase on efforts of Treasury De- 
partment to influence New York 
courts, 389. 

Curtis, George W., delegate to Repub- 
lican convention of 1860, 188. 

Dartmouth College, studies of Chase 
in, 5 ; visited by Chase in 1858, 179. 

Davis, David, candidate to succeed 
Taney, 320 ; appointed to Supreme 
Court, 325; dissents in Cummings 
Case, 347 ; dissents in case of Veazie 
Bank v. Fenno, 387. 

Davis, Jefferson, offers resolution to 
permit slavery in Territories, 128 ; 
cabinet officer under Franklin 
Pierce, 132 ; refuses fellowship to 
Douglas, 178 ; taken prisoner, 339 ; 
anxiety of Johnson to have him tried 
for treason, 352 ; refusal of Chase to 
sit in his trial, 352, 353 ; released by 
Chase in Circuit Court, 353 ; neces- 
sity for his release, 354. 

Democratic party, early attitude of 
Chase toward, 88; passes Fugitive 
Slave Law in Ohio, 90; wins election 
of 1844, 93; not attacked by Liberty 



INDEX 



451 



party because considered hopeless, 
93; looked to by Chase as likely to 
become anti-slavery, 94, 95 ; nomi- 
nates Cass, 96; expected by Chase to 
be forced to join Barnburners, 104; 
contests organization of Ohio House 
with Whigs, 105, 106; given control 
of House by Free-Soilers, 107; 
agrees to vote for Chase in return 
for state judges, 108, 111 ; members 
of, in Senate decline to recognize 
Chase, 114 ; Chase's hopes of re- 
forming, 115; abandoned by Chase 
in 1852-53, 132; over-confident in 
1854, 133; defeated in Congressional 
election, 151 ; war faction of, sup- 
ports Lincoln, 254; fuses tempora- 
rily with Republicans, 255; reor- 
ganizes in 1868, 365; candidacy of 
Chase for its nomination, 365-367; 
its convention of 1868 and candi- 
dates, 367 ; stampeded for Seymour, 
368; reasons why it failed to nom- 
inate Chase, 368; renewed desire of 
Chase for its nomination in 1872, 
413. 

Denison, George S., complains to 
Chase of corrupt trade with Con- 
federacy at New Orleans, 226, 228; 
tries to stimulate enlistment of ne- 
groes, 272. 

DeWitt, Alexander, signs appeal of 
Independent Democrats, 139. 

District of Columbia, slavery in, 46; 
movement for abolition in, 46, 47; 
its status under Constitution, 126; 
emancipation in, 257. 

Dixon, James, quarrel of Chase with, 
over patronage, 305. 

Dodge, Henry, in Nebraska debate, 
145. 

Douglas, Stephen A., calls Chase's 
election in 1849 a corrupt bargain, 
109; votes against executive ses- 
sions, 116; supports granting land 
to Illinois Central Railroad, 117; 
votes for Chase's anti- slavery 
amendment in 1850, 129; too 
strong for Chase in debate, 131; in 
troduces Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 133 : 
on Chase as an opponent, 134; his 
purpose in introducing bill, 135; 
his great powers as a debater, 136 ; 



secures aid from Pierce, 137; unable 
to understand anti-slavery men, 137 ; 
assailed in Appeal of Independent 
Democrats, 141 ; attacks Chase sav- 
agely in Senate, 141, 142; forces 
Chase into a disclaimer, 143; de- 
bates Nebraska Bill against Chase, 
144, 145 ; lobbies to carry bill 
through House, 145, 146 ; denounces 
new party as dangerous to Union, 
147 ; does not foresee rising of the 
North, 150, 171 ; denounces emi- 
grant aid societies, 171 ; opposes 
Lecompton constitution, 174 ; urged 
by Greeley as Republican candidate, 
174, 180 ; defeated in 1806, 196 ; sup- 
ports Lincoln's administration, 254. 

Dresser, Amos, whipped in Tennessee 
for possessing abolition documents, 
40 ; student at Oberlin, 42. 

Durkee, Charles, in House in 1849, 
114. 

Eels, Samuel, law partner of Chase, 
23 ; visits Birney, 51. 

Emancipation, early demand for, 250, 
263, 265 ; discussion in cabinet over, 
265, 266 ; preliminary proclamation 
of, discussed, 266-270; Blair's op- 
position to, 269. 

Evarts, William M., thought by Chase 
to be a candidate for chief justice- 
ship, 320, 321. 

Ewing, Thomas, his career in Con- 
gress, 156. 

Fee, John G., Kentucky abolitionist, 
corresponds with Chase, his later 
career, 83. 

Fessenden, W. P., in Nebraska de- 
bate, 145 ; supports Chase's finan- 
cial schemes, 235 ; succeeds Chase 
in Treasury, 318. 

Field, David Dudley, argues in favor 
of constitutionality of legal tender, 
389. 

Field, Maunsell, on Chase's indigna- 
tion at wasteful expenditure, 292; 
offered place of assistant treasurer 
by Chase, 315. 

Field, Stephen J., appointed to Su- 
preme Court, 325; said to have 
reported that the court held the 



452 



INDEX 



reconstruction acts unconstitu- 
tional, 356; dissents in Slaughter- 
house Cases, 381. 
Financial history, bad condition of 
the Treasury in 1860, 220 ; failure of 
Cobb's loan and issue of treasury 
notes, 220 ; Chase's early loans, 221; 
new loans and taxes granted by 
Congress, 221 ; difficulties in placing 
these loans, 222, 223 ; situation in 
December, 1861, 230 ; refusal of 
Chase to aid banks, 231 ; suspension 
of specie payments by banks, 231 ; 
lack of general confidence, 232 ; dis- 
cussion of Chase's failure to prevent 
suspension, 232, 233 ; errors due to 
expectation of a short war, 233 ; re- 
venue still deficient, 234 ; inability 
of Chase to foresee expenditures, 
235 ; Chase's report of December, 
1861, 236; reluctance of Chase to 
ask for taxes justified, 237 ; new 
tariff rates, 238 ; new internal taxes 
and their slow increase, 239 ; great 
receipts after Chase's retirement, 
240 ; use of treasury notes, 240, 241 ; 
new forms devised by Chase, 241, 
242 ; the five-twenty bonds, 242, 
243; effect of legal tenders upon 
them, 243 ; revenue and expendi- 
tures to 1864, 244, 245 ; disappear- 
ance of specie, 245; demand for 
currency, 245 ; passage of legal ten- 
der act, 246 ; discussion of its ne- 
cessity, 248-250 ; backwardness of 
Chase in taxation, 249 ; public de- 
mand for legal tender, 250, 251 ; 
legal tenders cause speculation in 
gold, 252 ; condition of state banks 
during war, 274, 275 ; proposed 
taxation of state bank notes, 276 ; 
Chase's scheme for national banks, 
276 ; continued use of legal tenders, 
277 ; gradual growth of feeling in fa- 
vor of national banks, 278 ; the first 
national bank act and its failure, 
__^279 ; proposal of Chase to tax state 
bank notes, 280, 281 ; amended bank 
bill, 282 ; taxation of state bank cir- 
culation, 282; success of Chase's 
policy, 282, 283; depreciation of 
legal tender, 283-285 ; gold contin- 
ues on Pacific coast, 284; futile 



measures to prevent gold specula- 
tion, 285; failure of the "Gold 
Bill," 286; criticism of Chase's 
measures, 288, 289 ; early cases up- 
hold legal tender, 389 ; redemption 
begun under McCulloch, 390; re- 
demption of legal tender prevented, 
391; Hepburn v. Griswold, 392- 
396 ; Legal Tender Cases, 404-412 ; 
discussion of question from finan- 
cial standpoint, 410, 411. 

Finney, Jerry, a fugitive slave, kid- 
naped at Columbus, 82. 

Flint, Timothy, publishes "Western 
Monthly Review," 18. 

Follett, Orren, Ohio editor, corre- 
sponds with Chase, 62. 

Foote, S. A., argues in favor of the 
constitutionality of legal tender, 
389. 

Freedmen, attempt of Chase to bene- 
fit, at Port Royal, 259, 260 ; propos- 
als to enlist, 262 ; armed by act of 
Congress, 263; continued efforts of 
Chase to assist, 271, 272; proposal 
of Chase to grant suffrage to, 272, 
273, 332, 335, 336, 339; assailed by 
vagrant laws, 336; protected by 
Bureau of Refugees, 336, 337; mis- 
sionary movement in behalf of, 337; 
protected by Civil Rights Act, 340; 
and by Fourteenth Amendment, 
341 ; exercise of suffrage by, under 
debate in 1868, 365-368; Chase's 
continued advocacy of, 370, 371. 

Free- Soil party, first steps towards, in 
Ohio taken by Chase, 96; proposed 
by Free Territory convention, 97; 
formed at Buffalo convention, 98- 
101; its vote in 1848, 102; expected 
by Chase to coalesce with Demo- 
crats, 102, 104; disrupted by events 
in Ohio senatorial election, 110; ef- 
forts of Chase to support, 131 ; aban- 
doned by Chase in 1851, 131 ; re- 
joined by Chase in 1852, 132; 
nominates Hale, its vote, 132; in- 
creases vote in 1853, 150. 

Fremont, John C, nominated for 
president in 1856, 160, 161 ; issues 
emancipation proclamation in Mis- 
souri, 256. 

Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, 32 ; can- 



INDEX 



453 



not be enforced in New England, 33; 
operates in Pennsylvania and the 
Northwest, 33; its validity denied 
by Chase, 71 ; attacked by Chase in 
Van Zandt Case, 77; in 1850 at- 
tacked by Chase, 120, 130; its effect 
on the North, 163; attempts of 
States to block, 163-165; fought by 
Chase's administration in Ohio, 
165-170; declared unconstitutional 
in "Wisconsin, 175. 

Garfield, James A., corresponds 
with Chase, 214, 295 ; counsel for 
Milligan, 345; his friendship with 
Chase, 421. 

Garland, A. H., in case before Su- 
preme Court, 347, 348. 

Garner, Margaret, fugitive slave, kills 
her child, 166 ; struggle over, be- 
tween federal and Ohio courts, 166. 

Garniss, Catherine Jane, marries 
Chase, her death, 20. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, his success 
in beginning anti-slavery agitation, 
36 ; his influence not strong in the 
"West, 36 ; influences Weld of Lane 
Seminary, 39; Chase's opinion of, 
50, 54 ; his views contrasted with 
those of Chase, 55 ; character of 
his paper, 61 ; rejoices at secession, 
199. 

Germans, settle in Ohio, 15; impor- 
tance of retaining them in 1855, 154, 
155; recognized by Chase, 157 ; their 
support expected by Chase, 182. 

Gibson, , commits defalcation 

as Ohio state treasurer, 161, 162 ; 
removed by Chase, 162. 

Giddings, Joshua R., representative 
of Western Reserve, 43, 57; on the 
unconstitutionality of slavery, 65; 
his early career as anti- slavery 
leader, 84; makes speeches at Buf- 
falo convention, 99; candidate of 
Free-Soil Whigs for senator from 
Ohio, 108; fails of election, 109; 
Free-Soil leader in House, 114, 119 ; 
drafts Appeal of Independent De- 
mocrats, 138; less prominent than 
Chase, 176. 

Grant, Ulysses S., attempts of Chase 
to make friends with, 297 ; prevents 



trial of Confederate generals for 
treason, 352 ; appointed by Johnson 
to succeed Stanton, 358 ; movement 
to nominate, in 1868, 363; appoints 
Boutwell Secretary of Treasury, 
392; appoints new judges to Su- 
preme Court, 397 ; discussion of his 
having packed the court, 399-401; 
his administration disapproved of 
by Chase, 413. 

Greeley, Horace, corresponds with 
Chase, 62 ; hostile to Seward, 191 ; 
favors allowing peaceable seces- 
sion, 199 ; works for Chase's nomi- 
nation in 1864, 309 ; his campaign in 
1872, 369 ; supported by Chase, 413. 

Green, Beriah, anti-slavery professor 
at Western Reserve College, 43. 

Grier, Robert C, in Supreme Court 
during war, 325 ; dissents in case of 
Texas v. White, 379 ; his opinion in 
Hepburn v. Griswold, 396 ; resigns, 
399. 

Grimes, James W. , urged by Chase to 
aid Kansas Free-Soilers, 172. 

Groesbeck, William M., law student 
under Chase, 24. 

Hale, John P., suggested as Liberty 
candidate in 1847, 95 ; nominated at 
Buffalo convention, 96 ; urged by 
Chase to withdraw, 96 ; the logical 
candidate of Free-Soilers, 100; with- 
draws from Liberty nomination, 
102 ; Chase's estimate of, 113 ; ex- 
cluded from Senate committees, 114, 
115 ; not a leader of Free-Soilers, 
119 ; Free-Soil candidate in 1852, 
132 ; superior to Chase in debate, 
148. 

Hall, James, issues *' Illinois Maga- 
zine and Western Souvenir," 18. 

Halleck, General Henry W., call of 
Chase upon, 296. 

Hamlin, E. S., Ohio editor, supporter 
of Chase, 62; becomes Chase's politi- 
cal lieutenant, 159. 

Hamlin, Hannibal, elected vice-presi- 
dent, 196. 

Hammond, Charles, joins Chase in a 
protest against mobbing Birney, 49. 

Hanna, Joshua, political lieutenant of 
Chase, 180 ; urges appointments for 



454 



INDEX 



merit, 218 ; suggests an investment 
for Chase, 417. 

Hanway, Castner, tried for treason in 
resisting slave-catchers, 165. 

Harrison, William H., supported by 
Chase for President in 1836, 86; and 
again in 1840, 87 ; alleged dissatisfac- 
tion of Chase with, 87, 88 ; tries to 
placate abolitionists in 1840, 89 ; 
urged by Chase not to favor slavery, 
89 ; his inaugural disappoints aboli- 
tionists, 89. 

Hart, Albert Gaillard, describes Buf- 
falo convention, 99-101. 

Hayes, Rutherford B., in Rosetta fugi- 
tive slave case, 165. 

Henry, T. C, urges issue of legal ten- 
der, 250. 

Hill, Judge, holds federal court in 
Mississippi, 343 ; asserts constitu- 
tionality of reconstruction law, 350. 

Hoadly, George, law partner of 
Chase, 24; studies law with Chase, 
25 ; on Chase's motives for leaving 
Whigs in 1841, 88 ; Chase's political 
lieutenant, 159 ; withdraws Chase's 
name from Republican convention, 
161 ; warns Chase that he has no 
chance in 1860, 189. 

Hoar, Ebenezer R., accused of con- 
spiring to pack the Supreme Court, 
399 ; his nomination to Supreme 
Court rejected by Senate, 400. 

Hooker, General Joseph, corresponds 
with Chase, 214, 296; efforts of 
Chase in his behalf, 297. 

Hooper, Samuel, favors Chase's bank- 
ing plans, 277. 

Houston, Sam, opposes Nebraska Bill, 
138. 

Howard, Mark, his nomination re- 
jected by Senate, 304. 

Howe, John W., in House in 1849, 
114. 

Hoyt, Jeanette Ralston Chase, her 
birth, 22 ; her marriage, 419, 420. 

Humphrey, Governor, brings suit to 
restrain operation of reconstruction 
act, 348. 

Hunt, Randall, brother-in-law of 
Chase, 21. 

Hunter, General David, in command 
in Carolina, 259 ; issues proclama- 



tion freeing slaves in three States, 
262. 

Illinois stumped by Chase in 1858, 
180. 

Impeachment of Johnson, basis of, 
358; disapproved of by Chase, 358, 
359; action of Chase as president 
during, 359, 360; its failure, 360. 

Internal improvements supported by 
Chase in Senate, 116. 

Jackson, Andrew, Chase's opinion of, 
in 1829, 9 ; not responsible for re- 
movals, according to Chase, 10 ; 
reconstitutes the Supreme Court, 
324. 

Jay, John, his experience in public 
office compared to Chase's, 323. 

Jay, John, corresponds with Chase, 83, 
422; on the results of the Nebraska 
Bill, 146. 

Jefferson, Thomas, his political prin- 
ciples held by Chase, 67. 

Johnson, Andrew, suggested by Chase 
as emissary to conciliate public 
opinion in England, 215; issues 
amnesty proclamation, 334; shows 
little interest in aiding freedmen, 
336; fails to prevent passage of 
Freedman's Bureau Act, 337; his 
quarrel with Congress, 338 ; alien- 
ates Chase by his attitude, 339; 
announces cessation of war in eleven 
States, 341 ; nominates Stanbery for 
Supreme Court, 342 ; agrees with 
judgments of court on validity of 
test oaths, 346; pardons Garland, 
347; declares reconstruction acts 
unconstitutional, 348; objects to 
case of Mississippi v. Johnson, 349 ; 
declines to interfere in case of 
Georgia v. Stanton, 349; anxious 
for trial of Davis, 352 ; directs sur- 
render of Davis to federal courts, 
352; issues general amnesty, 353; 
vetoes act diminishing jurisdiction 
of Supreme Court, 355; attempt to 
impeach, 357-361 ; removes Stanton, 
358; refuses to obey tenure of 
office act, 358 ; escapes conviction, 
360 ; proposes to enforce use of 
legal tender, 391. 



INDEX 



455 



Jones, Wharton, his slaves aided by 
Van Zandt to escape, 75; brings 
suits against Van Zandt, 76. 

Kansas, struggle for possession of, 
between North and South, 171, 172. 

Kendall, Amos, loses a fugitive slave, 
81. 

Kent, Edward, Governor of Maine, 
refuses to surrender a " slave 
stealer," 76. 

Kent, James, compliments Chase on 
his " Ohio Laws," 19. 

Kentucky, abolitionism in, 45, 83. 

King, Edward, law partner of Chase, 
22. 

King, Leicester, early Ohio abolition- 
ist, 84. 

King, Preston, in House in 1849, 114 ; 
candidate for Republican nomina- 
tion in 1856, 160. 

King, Rufus, on Chase's reasons for 
joining Liberty party, 88. 

Know-Nothings, their origin and early 
success, 152 ; condemned by Chase, 
153; demand that Chase join their 
order to secure their support, 154 ; 
break-up in 1856, 158. 

Lamon, Wabd H., removed from mar- 
shalship by Chase, 322. 

Lander, Frederick W., corresponds 
with Chase, 214. 

Lands, public, regulated by Home- 
stead Act, 117 ; granted to railways, 
117. 

Lane Seminary, anti-slavery episode 
at, 39-42. 

Lawrence, , in Matilda fugitive 

slave case, 73. 

Leavitt, Humphrey H., his decision 
in Anderson fugitive slave case, 168. 

Leavitt, Joshua, corresponds with 
Chase, 62. 

Legislature of Ohio, elects Chase 
senator, 104-112 ; divides Hamilton 
County in 1848, 105; contest over 
elections to, from Hamilton County, 
105; contest over organization of 
House, 105, 106; organized by 
Townshend and Morse at Chase's 
suggestion, 106, 107; repeals Black 
Laws, 107 ; elects Chase to Senate, 



109, 111 ; declines to reelect Chase, 
133 ; urged by Chase to aid Kansas, 
172 ; elects Chase senator, 181. 

Lewis, Samuel, typical Western abo- 
litionist, 57 ; as Free-Soil candidate 
voted against by Chase in 1850, 131. 

Liberal Republicans sympathized with 
by Chase, 413. 

Liberty newspapers aided by Chase, 
61, 62. 

Liberty party, origin of, in Ohio in 
years 1835-40, 85, 86 ; its vote in 
1840, 87; joined by Chase, 87-90; 
organized and inspired by Chase, 
91, 92; nominates Birney in 1843, 
its platform, 92; its vote in 1844, 93; 
its refusal to vote for Clay justified, 
93, 94; fails to grow in Ohio, 94 ; 
available candidates for, in 1847, 
95; at Buffalo nominates Hale, 95, 
96; desired by Chase to coalesce 
with Free-Soilers, 96; dissolves in 
Ohio, 97. 

Lincoln, Abraham, as a debater com- 
pared with Douglas, 143 ; his cam- 
paign against Douglas for the Sen- 
ate, 174, 180; not recognized by 
Chase as a rival for Republican 
nomination, 180, 187; proposed as 
vice-president, 182 ; attempts of 
Chase's lieutenants to win over, 187, 
188; receives solid support of Illi- 
nois, 188 ; receives support of all 
elements opposed to Seward, 193; 
his nomination secured by some 
Chase delegates, 194; congratulated 
by Chase, 195; elected to presi- 
dency, 196 ; plans to have both Sew- 
ard and Chase in his cabinet, 197; 
makes no offers for a month, 198; 
wishes Seward to oppose Crittenden 
compromise, 202; asks Chase if he 
will accept the Treasury Depart- 
ment, 202, 203; refuses to change 
his mind, 205; urges Chase to ac- 
cept, 206; his inaugural, 207; his 
leadership not realized at first by 
cabinet, 207 ; asks opinion of cabi- 
net on question of relieving Sum- 
ter, 208, 209; ignores Seward's 
proposal for foreign war, 210; issues 
proclamation calling for volunteers, 
211; lacks confidence in Cameron, 



456 



INDEX 



211; asks Chase's aid in drafting 
orders, 211, 212 ; urges Cisco to 
hold office, 217; appoints Barney 
collector of port of New York, 217 ; 
seldom interferes with Chase's pa- 
tronage, 219; approves Chase's or- 
ders for sale of confiscated property, 
225; approves Chase's orders regu- 
lating trade with the South, 228; 
dreads heavy taxation, 237; annuls 
Fremont's emancipation proclama- 
tion, 256; reluctant to authorize 
Chase to provide for negro refu- 
gees, 259, 260; favors compensated 
emancipation, 260, 261 ; favors colo- 
nization, 261; annuls Hunter's 
emancipation proclamation, 262; 
reluctant to proclaim emancipa- 
tion, 264, 265 ; reads draft to cabi- 
net, 265-269; asks for suggestions 
on final proclamation, 270; his in- 
difference to negro suffrage de- 
plored by Chase, 273 ; sends message 
recommending national banks, 278; 
not dissatisfied with Chase's finan- 
cial management, 287 ; not intimate 
with Chase, 290; reasons for his 
attitude, 290, 291 ; shows considera- 
tion and fairness toward Chase, 
291 ; differs from Chase in his atti- 
tude on union and slavery, 291, 292; 
harassed by Chase's advice in mili- 
tary matters, 292 ; his disregard of 
cabinet opinion complained of by 
Chase, 293, 294; pains Chase by neg- 
lecting his advice, 294; refuses to 
dismiss McClellan, 294, 295; criti- 
cised by Chase, 297-299; his forbear- 
ance, 299 ; urged by Republican sena- 
tors to reconstruct his cabinet, 302 ; 
dissatisfaction of Chase with his 
weakness, 302, 303; refuses to ac- 
cept Seward's and Chase's resigna- 
tions, 303; appears better in affair 
than the secretaries, 304; attempt 
of Chase to coerce in matter of ap- 
pointments in Treasury Department, 
304, 305; removes Victor Smith, 
306; persuades Chase to withdraw 
his resignation, 306, 307; defied by 
Stanton in minor matters, 307; 
sometimes ignored by Seward, 307; 
annoyed by Chase's captiousness, 



308; obliged to keep his party in 
line, 308; tribute of Chase to his 
fairness, 310; temporarily dis- 
credited in 1863, 310,311; declines 
to call for Chase's resignation after 
the Pomeroy Circular, 312; enrages 
Chase by giving Blair a position in 
the army, 314; renominated for 
President, 314; asks Chase for 
removal of Barney, 315; tries to 
harmonize Chase's and Morgan's 
quarrel over offices, 316; accepts 
Chase's resignation, 317; Chase's 
comments on his action, 317, 318; 
announces purpose to appoint Chase 
to succeed Taney, 319 ; unmoved by 
opposition to Chase, 321 ; nominates 
Chase for Chief Justice, 321 ; recon- 
stitutes the Supreme Court, 324, 
325 ; proposes circuit judges, 324; 
declines to notice Taney's opinion 
in Merryman Case, 327 ; his theory 
of reconstruction, 329; secures ad- 
mission of West Virginia and recog- 
nition of Louisiana, 330 ; his amnesty 
proclamation, 330, 331; criticised 
by Chase, 331; vetoes Congressional 
reconstruction bill, 332; causes re- 
organization in three States, 332 ; 
assassinated, 333; his reputation 
overshadows other war leaders, 430; 
not appreciated properly by Chase, 
431, 432; his opinion of Chase, 435. 

Lincoln, Mrs. Abraham, her rivalry 
with Mrs. Sprague, 420. 

Ludlow, Israel, founder of Cincinnati, 
21. 

Ludlow, James C, father-in-law of 
Chase, aids Lane Seminary seceders, 
40. 

Ludlow, Sarah B. D., third wife of 
Chase, her character, 21. 

Lundy, Benjamin, his anti-slavery 
labors in Ohio and the West, 36. 

McCaedlk, Colonel, case of, before 
Supreme Court, 350; taken out of 
jurisdiction of court by act of Con- 
gress, 355. 

McClellan, George B., early friend- 
ship of Chase for, 213; repulses 
Chase, 224 ; attempt of Chase and 
Seward to compel his dismissal, 294; 



INDEX 



457 



attempts of Chase to inspire, 295 ; 
loses confidence of Chase, 296; sup- 
ported by Seward, 303. 

McCook, , corresponds with 

Chase, 214; nominates Seymour in 
Democratic convention of 1868, 368. 

McCulloch, Hugh, as Secretary of 
Treasury begins redemption of legal 
tender notes, 390. 

McDowell, General Irwin, favored by 
Chase, 296. 

McLean, John T., uncle of Chase by 
marriage, 22; his decision in Van 
Zandt Case, 76 ; candidate for Whig 
nomination in 1840, 86; considered 
as possible Liberty candidate, 95; 
considered as possible Free-Soil 
candidate, 98; candidate for Re- 
publican nomination in 1856, 160, 
161; his opinion in Rosetta slave 
case, 166; candidate for Republican 
nomination in 1860, 189 ; his death, 
324. 

Mahan, Asa, resigns trusteeship of 
Lane Seminary, 40 ; accepts presi- 
dency of Oberlin College, 42. 

Marshall, John, Chase's opinion of, 
319; compared with Chase, 425. 

Martin, John, asks Chase's aid for his 
mulatto children, 81. 

Matilda, fugitive slave, defended by 
Birney and Chase, 73. 

Matthews, Stanley, studies law under 
Chase, 24; his part in arranging for 
Chase's election to Senate, 111, 112. 

Medill, Joseph, Democratic candidate 
for governor of Ohio, 155. 

Merryman, John, case of, 326, 327. 

Mexican war, its purpose, 120. 

Miller, Samuel F., appointed to Su- 
preme Court, 325; dissents in Cum- 
mings Case, 347 ; dissents in Texas v. 
White, 379; contradicts Chase re- 
garding Hepburn v. Griswold, 403. 

Milligan, L. P. , in case before Supreme 
Court, 344-346. 

Mitchell, , corresponds with 

Chase, 214. 

Molitor, , Ohio editor, friend of 

Chase, 62. 

Monfort, H., fined for employing a 
negro woman, 82. 

Monroe, James, studies law with 



Chase, 25; secured an office by Chase, 
215. 

Morehead, Charles S., asked by Chase 
to extradite Margaret Garner, 167. 

Morgan, General C. H., corresponds 
with Chase, 295. 

Morgan, Edwin D., insists on spoils of 
New York assistant treasurer's 
office, 315; his dealings with Chase 
and Lincoln, 316. 

Morgan, John, anti-slavery instructor, 
dismissed from Lane Seminary, 40; 
accepts professorship in Oberlin Col- 
lege, 42. 

Morris, Thomas, counsel for Van 
Zandt, 76 ; first abolitionist senator, 
85. 

Morse, J. F., elected to Ohio legisla- 
ture in 1848, 105, 106; prefers Gid- 
dings to Chase for senator, 108; 
influenced by Chase in Hamilton 
County question, 110; carries bill 
for repeal of Black Laws, 110. 

Nebraska Bill, struggle over, 133- 
146 ; reasons for its introduction, 
133; leaders in debate over, 134; bill 
reshaped to suit South, 134, 135; 
reasons for and against the bill, 
136 ; attacked in appeal of Indepen- 
dent Democrats, 138-141; passed, 
145, 146; results predicted by Chase, 
147. 

Needham, Edgar, abolitionist in Ken- 
tucky, 83. 

Negroes, free, origin of, in Ohio, 15, 
29 ; number of, 29 ; laws regulating, 
30; buy their freedom, 31; mobs 
against, in Cincinnati, 31 ; efforts of 
Lane Seminary students to benefit, 
40; report on their condition, 44; 
give Chase a silver pitcher, 82; 
Black Laws concerning, repealed, 
110. 

Nelson, Judge Samuel, on Supreme 
bench during war, 325 ; dissents in 
case of Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 387. 

Nelson, General W., efforts of Chase 
to assist, 213. 

New Mexico, status of slavery in, 120. 

New York, efforts of Chase to obtain 
support in, 180; corruption of 
Weed's politics in, 184-187. 



458 



INDEX 



Nichols, Eli, Chase's agent in election 
of 1849, 112. 

Nicolay, John G., marshal of Supreme 
Court, 323. 

North, causes for anti-slavery move- 
ment in, 35, 36; humanitarian 
advance in, since colonial times, 
contrasted with backwardness of 
South, 121 ; members of, in Con- 
gress not combined against slavery, 
123; aroused by the passage of the 
Nebraska act, 146 ; passes personal 
liberty laws to impede slave-catch- 
ing, 163, 164; carried by Republi- 
cans in 1860, 196; apparently ready 
to permit secession, 199, 200 ; roused 
by fall of Sumter, 211. 

Northwest, historical sketch of, by 
Chase, 19, 20; peculiarities of abo- 
litionism in, 37, 56, 57. 

Oberlin College, foundation of, 41; 
receives Lane Seminary seceders, 
42; political influence of, 42, 43. 

Ohio, early religious life in, 4; pro- 
sperity of southern part of, 14 ; early 
settlers of, 14, 15, 28; trade com- 
munications in, 15, 16; laws of, 
codified by Chase, 19; rivalry in, 
between northern and southern 
parts, 29; Black Laws in, 30, 31; 
slavery prohibited in, 33, 34 ; early 
anti-slavery societies in, 35, 36; 
legislature of, passes resolutions 
favoring emancipation, 36; begin- 
ning of abolitionism in, 36-39; for- 
mation of State Anti-Slavery Society 
in, 44 ; courts of, return fugitive 
slaves and convict rescuers, 73-75, 
80,81; early abolitionists in, politics 
in, 84, 86; Liberty party vote in, 93, 
94; Free-Territory Convention in, 
96, 97 ; senatorial struggle in, 104- 
112; efforts of Chase to benefit, as 
senator, 116 ; fortunes of Free-Soil 
party in, 131, 132; carried by anti- 
Nebraska movement, 151 ; campaign 
of Chase in, for governor, 154-156; 
important effect of its being carried 
by Republicans, 156; economic con- 
dition under Chase's administra- 
tion, 156; political management in, 
by Chase, 157 ; principal features of 



Chase's administration, 158; corrup- 
tion in treasurer's office, 161, 162; 
again carried by Republicans, 162, 
163; fugitive slave cases in, during 
Chase's administration, 165-170; its 
courts conflict with federal courts, 
166, 167, 169, 170; failure of Chase 
to control Republican delegates in, 
189, 192, 193; recommends Lincoln's 
renomination, 314; ratifies Fifteenth 
Amendment through Chase's influ- 
ence, 372. 

Opdyke, George, supports Chase for 
Republican nomination in 1860, 191 
abandons Chase for Lincoln, 193 
aids Chase's financial measures, 222 
urges issue of legal tender, 250 
tries to organize national banks, 
280. 

Ordinance of 1787, Chase's history of, 
19; prescribes return of fugitive 
slaves, 33; prohibits slavery, 34; 
held by Chase to invalidate Fugi- 
tive Slave Act, 71; Chase's use of, 
in Van Zandt argument, 77; ap- 
pealed to by Chase, 123. 

Pacific Railroad, plan to construct, 
favored by Chase, 118. 

Parish, Francis D., convicted in a 
fugitive slave case, 80. 

Parker, Theodore, letter of Chase to, 
on his political principles, 56. 

Parsons, Richard C, secured a po- 
sition by Chase, 215; marshal of 
Supreme Court, 322; obliged to re- 
sign, 323. 

Paul, Dr., Chase's letter to, on Know- 
Nothing party, 133, 134. 

Payne, Henry B., defeated by Chase 
for governor, 162. 

Peace Conference in 1860 fails to se- 
cure a compromise, 204. 

Pendleton, George H., candidate for 
Democratic nomination in 1868, 367, 
368. 

Phillips, Wendell, his true place in the 
abolition movement, 37, 55 ; attacks 
Chase for his attitude in Garner case, 
167 ; proposes abolition of Supreme 
Court, 346. 

Pierce, Edward L., studies law under 
Chase, 24 ; on Chase's self-interest, 



INDEX 



25 ; on Chase's reasons for joining 
Liberty party, 87 ; tells Chase his 
chances for nomination in 1856 are 
hopeless, 160 ; works for Chase in 
1860, 180 ; has to vote for Seward in 
convention, 191 ; visits North Caro- 
lina in interests of freedmen, 259; his 
friendship with Chase, 421. 

Pierce, Franklin, elected President, 
adopts a pro-slavery policy, 132. 

Polk, James K., nominated for Presi- 
dent as an annexationist, 92, 93. 

Pomeroy, Samuel C, issues circular 
proposing Chase for President, 312. 

Pope, General John, sympathy of 
Chase with, 296. 

Popular sovereignty, reasons for popu- 
larity of the doctrine, 136. 

Powers, Hiram, purchase of his statue 
of America urged by Chase, 119. 

Price, John, fugitive slave rescued by 
mob in Oberlin, 169. 

Pugh, George, law student under 
Chase, 24 ; Democratic contestant 
for seat in Ohio legislature, 105, 
106 ; gains seat through Chase's in- 
fluence, 109, 110, 111 ; elected sena- 
tor in 1854, 133 ; counsel for slave- 
catchers in Anderson case, 168 ; calls 
coercion impossible, 199. 

Quincy, Edmund, calls Chase a politi- 
cal huckster, 55. 

Ralston, Janet, mother of S. P. 
Chase, 2 ; struggles to give her chil- 
dren an education, 5. 

Randolph, John, Chase's opinion of, 
in 1829, 10. 

Rankin, Dr. John, early abolitionist in 
Ohio, 38. 

Read, Judge, renders decision return- 
ing a fugitive slave, and later is 
turned out of office by Free-Soilers, 
80. 

Reconstruction, problem of, 329 ; Lin- 
coln's theory of, 329, 330 ; Chase's 
opposing view of, 330 ; begun in 
Louisiana, 330 ; outlined in amnesty 
proclamation, 330, 331 ; Lincoln's 
veto of reconstruction bill, 332; 
process continues in two States, 
332 ; renewed by Johnson's amnesty 



proclamation, 334 ; process of, 336 ; 
different views of Congress and 
Johnson regarding, 338 ; passage of 
Civil Rights Act, 340 ; reconstruc- 
tion acts of 1867, 341, 342 ; refusal 
of Supreme Court to consider cases 
involving, 348-350 ; completed in the 
South, 357; upheld in Texas v. White, 
378 ; and in White v. Hart, 380. 
Republican party, beginnings of, 146 ; 
formation of, predicted by Chase, 
147 ; its origin in Anti-Nebraska ac- 
tion, 150, 151 ; elects a majority of 
congressmen, 151 ; not regarded by 
Chase as permanent, 152 ; infected 
with Know-Nothingism, 153; nomi- 
nates Chase for governor in Ohio, 
154, 155; suffers reaction in 1855, 
156 ; gains by disruption of Know- 
Nothing party, 159 ; efforts of Chase 
to secure its nomination for Presi- 
dent, 159-161 ; holds preliminary 
convention at Pittsburg, 160 ; nomi- 
nates Fremont, 161 ; carries Ohio in 
1857, 162 ; place held by Chase in, 
163 ; vacillates regarding Kansas, 
173; movement in, to support Doug- 
las, 174, 180 ; gains ground in 1858, 
178 ; canvass for presidential nomi- 
nation in, 178-190 ; not consolidated 
in 1860, 183 ; different elements in, 
183; corrupt elements of, 190; holds 
convention at Chicago, 190; nomi- 
nates Lincoln, 191-194 ; reasons why 
it fails to nominate Chase, 195 ; 
elects Lincoln, 196 ; its platform, 
198 ; regards secession as a trick, 
198 ; ready to compromise in 1860, 
201 ; refuses to pass Crittenden 
compromise, 204 ; not anti-slavery 
in 1861, 253 ; different elements of, 
253, 254 ; supported by war Demo- 
crats, 255 ; dissatisfaction in, with 
Lincoln and Seward, 302, 310 ; ques- 
tion of nomination in 1864, 308-314 ; 
movement in, for Chase, 309 ; re- 
nominates Lincoln, 314 ; campaign 
of 1864, 320 ; opposition in, to 
Chase's appointment as chief jus- 
tice, 321 ; desire of Chase for nomi- 
nation in 1868, 361-363 ; nominates 
Grant, 363; abandoned by Chase, 
365 ; loses ground in country, 369 ; 



460 



INDEX 



leaders of, as a rule , oppose Chase, 
422. 

Riddle, A. G., on the election of Chase 
to Senate, 112 ; his skill in Ober- 
lin rescue case, 170; urges Chase 
upon Lincoln for chief justiceship, 
321. 

Robinson, Charles, free-state gover- 
nor of Kansas, visits Chase, 172 ; 
recommends Brown to Chase, 174 ; 
on Chase's chances for nomination, 
180 ; on Weed's corruption, 184. 

Root, J. F., in House in 1849, 114. 

Rosecrans, General W. S., corresponds 
with Chase, 297. 

Rosetta, fugitive slave, contended for 
by Ohio and federal courts, 165. 

Rousseau, General L. H., congratu- 
lated by Chase, 297. 

Saxton, General Rufus, appointed 
military governor of South Carolina, 
aids negro refugees, 260. 

Schenck, Robert C, on necessity for 
curbing power of Supreme Court, 
355. 

Schuckers, J. W., on Chase's reasons 
for joining Liberty party in 1841, 
87. 

Scott, General Winfield, advises 
against provisioning Sumter, 208. 

Secession, defied by Chase in 1850, 
128 ; threatened in 1860, 198 ; possi- 
ble methods of meeting, 199 ; at 
first meets no opposition, 199 ; at- 
tempts to avoid, by compromise, 
201-205 ; Lincoln's attitude on, 
205. 

Senate of the United States, regards 
Chase as insignificant, 112 ; anti- 
slavery men in, 113, 114 ; excludes 
Chase and others from committees, 
114, 115 ; share in business of, taken 
by Chase, 116-119 ; debates Clay's 
Compromise resolutions, 124-129 ; 
controlled by junction of Webster 
with the South, 124 ; Chase's speech 
in, on compromise, 125-128 ; defeats 
Chase's motion to exclude slavery 
from New Mexico, 129 ; debates Ne- 
braska Bill, 142-145 ; rejects Chase's 
amendments, 144 ; passes the bill, 
145, 146 ; summary of Chase's ca- 



reer in, 148 ; in impeachment of 
Johnson, 357-361. 
Seward, William H., as governor of 
New York, refuses to extradite a 
" slave-stealer," 76 ; counsel in Van 
Zandt Case, 76 ; protests against 
Chase's bitterness toward Whigs, 
80 ; plan to nominate, protested 
against by Birney, 92 ; suggested 
as Liberty candidate in 1847, 95 ; 
Chase's opinion of, as a senator, 
113 ; excluded from Senate commit- 
tees, 115 ; for the Whig party first, 
120 ; not in sympathy with Chase, 
124, 125 ; his political prestige, 125; 
Douglas's opinion of, 134; his minor 
part in Nebraska debate, 145 ; does 
not seek Republican nomination in 
1856, 160 ; his caution, 176 ; a better 
party leader than Chase, 177 ; his 
" irrepressible conflict " speech, 
180 ; elements of weakness in his 
candidacy in 1860, 183, 184 ; dam- 
aged by his corrupt support, 184; 
receives solid support of New York, 
188 ; apparently sure of nomination, 
191 ; defeated by coalition, 193, 194; 
desired by Lincoln in his cabinet, 
197, 200; acts as leader in discussing 
compromises, 200, 201 ; refuses to 
accept Crittenden compromise, 202; 
follows Lincoln's wish, 202 ; urged 
by Chase not to make concessions, 
203 ; assumes attitude of leader of 
administration, 207 ; on good terms 
with Chase, 207 ; opposes attempt 
to relieve Sumter, 209 ; submits his 
foreign policy to Lincoln, 210; ready 
to favor action against slavery, 265 ; 
suggests modifications of Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation, 268, 269; his per- 
sonal intimacy with Lincoln envied 
by Chase, 290 ; at first a rival, later 
on good terms with Chase, 301,302; 
dissatisfaction of radicals with, 302; 
agrees with Chase to resign from 
cabinet, 302 ; Lincoln's principal 
supporter, 303; resumes office, 303 ; 
eager for Lincoln's protection, 304 ; 
sometimes assumes undue responsi- 
bility, 307 ; loses reputation under 
Johnson, 362 ; morally inferior to 
Chase, 429, 431, 432. 



INDEX 



461 



Seymour, Horatio, declines to be 
Democratic candidate, 367 ; nomi- 
nated by a stampede, 368. 
Sherman, Judge Charles, obliged to 
resign, 323. 

Sherman, John, prefers Seward to 
Chase in 1860, 194. 

Sherman, "W. T., letters of Chase to, 
on military matters, 213. 

Shields, General James, asks Chase 
to confer on his behalf with Lincoln, 
295. 

Shipherd, John J., founds Oberlin 
College, 41 ; insists on engaging in- 
structors dismissed from Lane Sem- 
inary and on opening college to 
colored students, 41, 42. 

Sickles, Daniel, complains of failure 
of efforts to prevent trade with 
South, 229 ; has controversy with 
Chase as federal judge, 343 ; re- 
moved by Johnson, 344. 

Skinner, Ralston, studies law under 
Chase, 24. 

Slavery, Chase's argument against its 
legality, 63-73 ; its status under the 
Constitution, 63; question of its 
moral good or ill, 64 ; Giddings's 
doctrine of its unconstitutionality, 
66 ; real attitude of Constitution on, 
69 ; permitted by Congress south of 
Ohio, 69 ; struggle over, in the Ter- 
ritories begins, 103, 120 ; keeps South 
backward in civilization, 121 ; new 
attitude of South toward, 122, 123 ; 
not in question in 1861, 253 ; inten- 
tion of attacking, disclaimed, 254; 
Lincoln's plans for emancipation, 
256 ; abolished in Territories, 257, 
258 ; attempt of Hunter to abolish, 
in coast States, 262, 263. 

Slaves, fugitive, in Ohio, 29, 32; 
helped by Underground Railroad, 
32 ; reclaimed in Ohio, 33 ; Chase's 
efforts in behalf of, 73-83 ; appeal to 
Chase for all kinds of help, 81, 82 ; 
in Civil War, status of, 255, 256; 
take refuge in Union lines, 258 ; ex- 
pected to rise if emancipated, 263, 
264 ; freed by Lincoln's Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation, 270. 

Smith, Eliza Ann, second wife of 
Chase. 21. 



Smith, Gerrit, candidate for Liberty 
nomination in 1847, 95 ; signs Appeal 
of Independent Democrats, 139. 

Smith, Victor, appointed to office at 
Chase's suggestion, 305; commits 
indiscretions as collector at Puget 
Sound, 305, 306; removed by Lin- 
coln, 306; less disturbed than Chase, 
307. 

Smith, W. B., corresponds with Chase, 
214. 

Soul£, Pierre, his relations with Chase, 
148. 

South, gradual change of its opinion 
regarding slavery, 35 ; reasons for 
its desire to suppress abolitionists, 
38 ; driven by abolitionists' attacks 
into defense of slavery, 64 ; enraged 
at failure to secure California, 120; 
continues brutality of eighteenth 
century into the nineteenth, 121 ; 
considers itself aggrieved by atti- 
tude of North toward District of 
Columbia and Fugitive Slave Law, 
122 ; its real reasons for demanding 
extension of slavery, 122, 123; gains 
by Compromise of 1850, 130 ; pro- 
poses to gain by Nebraska Bill, 133 ; 
wishes explicit repeal of Missouri 
Compromise, 135 ; plans secession, 
198 ; secedes, 202, 203 ; unaffected 
by Emancipation Proclamation, 270; 
political and economic condition 
after war, 333, 334 ; elements of re- 
construction in, 334, 335 ; cessation 
of war in, proclaimed by Johnson, 
341 ; beginnings of federal courts in, 
343, 344 ; completion of reconstruc- 
tion in, 357 ; suppression of negro 
vote in, 381. 

Southgate, H. H. , prevents nomination 
of Chase for state senator in 1840, on 
anti-slavery grounds, 88. 

Spaulding, Elbridge G. , urges issue of 
legal tender notes, 246, 247. 

Spoils system, introduction of, ob- 
served by Chase, 9 ; under Lincoln's 
administration, 216-219, 304-306, 
315, 316 ; refusal of Chase to em- 
ploy, 311. 

Spooner, Lysander, his doctrine as to 
relation of Constitution and slavery, 



462 



INDEX 



Sprague, Kate Chase, her birth, 21; 
marriage to Senator Sprague, 419; 
sketch of her character and ambi- 
tions, 420. 
Stanbery, Henry, his nomination to 
Supreme Court rejected by Senate, 
342. 
Stanford, Leland, delegate to Repub- 
lican convention of 1860, 188. 
Stanton, Benjamin, suggests a case 
to test constitutionality of slavery, 
82. 
Stanton, Edwin M., authorizes enlist- 
ment of negroes, 263 ; fails to enjoy 
Lincoln's jokes, 266 ; upbraided by 
Chase for wastefulness, 293 ; his 
efficiency not understood by Chase, 
300; Chase's opinion of, 301 ; defies 
Lincoln in small matters, 307 ; ex- 
pected by Chase to resign when he 
does, 317 ; thought by Chase to be a 
candidate to succeed Taney, 320; 
suit of Georgia against, 349 ; issues 
writs for arrest of leading Con- 
federates, 352 ; removed from office 
by Johnson, 358 ; named for Su- 
preme Court, but dies, 400 ; com- 
pared with Chase, 430. 
Stanton, H. B., at organization of 
Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, 44; sug- 
gests J. P. Hale as Liberty candi- 
date in 1847, 95; corresponds with 
Chase, 98 ; on Weed's corrupt man- 
agement, 185. 
Stevens, Thaddeus, urged by Chase to 
make no concessions, 203; leads 
House, 234; exceeds Chase's plans 
for taxation, 239; opposes Chase's 
plan for national banks, 277; dis- 
gusted at Chase's action in Johnson 
impeachment, 360; his reasons for 
advocating negro suffrage, 370; 
compared with Chase, 430. 
Stewart, Philo P., founds Oberlin Col- 
lege, 41. 
Story, Joseph, compliments Chase on 
his " Ohio Laws," 19; on Chase's 
Van Zandt argument, 77. 
Strong, William, appointed to Supreme 
Court, 399 ; known to be a supporter 
of the constitutionality of legal ten- 
der, 401; gives decision in Legal 
Tender Cases, 404. 



Suffrage, negro. See Freedmen. 

Sumner, Charles, compared with 
Western abolitionists, 57 ; corre- 
sponds with Chase, 98 ; predicts 
Chase's success in Senate, 113; 
elected to Senate, 114 ; not a parlia- 
mentarian, 119 ; Douglas's opinion 
of, 134; signs Appeal of Independent 
Democrats, 138 ; less prominent than 
Chase, 176; disabled by Brooks, 180; 
urges appointment of Chase as chief 
justice, 321; his reasons for advo- 
cating negro suffrage, 370 ; Chase's 
only intimate friend among leaders, 
422; compared with Chase, 430. 

Sumter, Fort, question of its relief, 
208-211 ; successive consultations of 
cabinet on, 208, 210. 

Supreme Court, decides Prigg Case, 
76; decides against Chase in Van 
Zandt Case, 76 ; Chase's early opin- 
ion of, 319; patronage of, 322, 323; 
its depressed condition during war, 

323, 324 ; its political character 
changed by Lincoln's appointments, 

324, 325 ; continues conservative tra- 
ditions, 325 ; in case of New York v. 
Commissioners, 326 ; decides Prize 
Cases, 326 ; in Vallandigham Case, 
327, 328 ; declines to pass on cases 
involving status of seceded States, 
328 ; its numbers reduced by Con- 
gress, 342 ; decides Milligan Case, 
344-346; gains unpopularity, 346; 
in Cummings v. Missouri, 346, 347; 
in Garland Case, 347, 348 ; declines 
to consider reconstruction in Mis- 
sissippi v. Johnson, 348, 349; de- 
clines to consider Georgia v. Stanton, 
349, 350; hears McCardle Case, 350; 
refuses to consider treason cases, 
351-353; in danger of attack from 
Congress, 354 ; its jurisdiction di- 
minished by Congress, 355 ; admits 
a negro to bar, 373 ; lecides to en- 
force anti-bellum slave contracts in 
White v. Hart, 373; gives conflict- 
ing decisions as to beginning and 
end of war, 374; on the Confederate 
government, 375; decides cases on 
amnesty and confiscation acts, 376; 
in TarbeWs Case, 377, 378; in Texas 
v. White announces doctrine of 



INDEX 



463 



indestructible Union, 378-380; in 
White v. Hart on reconstruction, 
380 ; in Slaughter-house Cases 
restricts bearing of anti-slavery 
amendments, 381-383 ; enforces war 
taxes, 385; in License Tax Cases, 
386 ; in Veazie Bank Case supports 
tax on state bank notes, 386, 387; 
in three cases limits use of legal 
tender, 393 ; in Hepburn v. Griswold 
holds legal tender unconstitutional) 
394-397; this decision criticised, 

398, 399; reorganized by Grant, 

399, 401 ; struggle in, between new 
members and old over reconsidera- 
tion of legal tender question, 402, 
403 ; in Legal Tender Cases reverses 

" decision, 404-408; discussion of its 
decision, 408-410 ; damaged in pre- 
stige, 412 ; upholds income tax in 
Collector v. Day, 388. 

Swan, Joseph W., refused reelection 
by Republicans on anti-slavery 
grounds, 170. 

Swayne, Noah H., wishes to succeed 
Taney, 320; appointed to Supreme 
Court, 325; dissents in Cummings 
Case, 347; dissents in Texas v. White, 
379; dissents in Slaughter-House 
Cases, 381. 

Taney, Roger B., said to have been 
influenced by Chase's argument in 
Morse telegraph case, 26; dies in 
office, 320, 324; protests against 
suspension of habeas corpus in 
Merry man Case, 326, 327. 

Taylor, J. W., Ohio editor, studies 
law with Chase, 62. 

Taylor, Zachary, nominated by Whigs 
for President, 96 ; his policy toward 
California and New Mexico angers 
South, 120; effect of his death on 
the territorial struggle, 128. 

Texas, quest£»n of its annexation in 
campaign of 1844, 92-94; question 
of responsibility of Liberty party 
for its annexation, 93; question of 
its boundary in 1850, 126; necessity 
of reconstruction in, 339; in case of 
Texas v. White, 379. 

Thome, J. A., anti-slavery leader at 
Lane Seminary, 39. 



Tilden, Samuel J., favors a new policy 
for Democratic party, 365. 

Townshend, Mary, asks Chase's aid in 
purchasing freedom for her family, 
81. 

Townshend, Norton, elected to Ohio 
legislature in 1848, 105, 106; favors 
Chase for senator, 108 ; his course 
in struggle of 1849 dictated by 
Chase, 110, 111. 

Treasury Department, Chase ap- 
pointed to, 206; its management 
learned by Chase, 207; demoralized 
in 1860, 216; new officials in, ap- 
pointed by Chase, 216-219 ; diffi- 
culties over spoils in, 217, 218; new 
administration of, by Chase, 220; 
takes charge of confiscated property ? 
224, 225; supervises prohibition of 
trade with enemy, 225-229. 

Trent affair, Chase's attitude in, 215. 

Trimble, Allen, "Whig and Know-No- 
thing candidate for governor of 
Ohio, 155. 

Trollope, Mrs. , her description of Cin- 
cinnati not adequate, 16. 

Tuck, Amos, in House in 1849, 114. 

Turner, Elizabeth, released by Chase's 
decision against Maryland emanci- 
pation act, 351. 

Tyler, John, Chase's opinion of, 87. 

Underground Railroad, its begin- 
nings, 32, 39 ; its operation, 75. 

Underwood, John C, holds federal 
courts in Virginia, 343 ; admits 
Davis to bail, 353. 

Vallandigham, Clement L., counsel 
for slave-catchers, 168 ; predicts 
Southern occupancy of Washington 
in 1860, 199 ; his sentence by court- 
martial disapproved of by Chase, 
300 ; case of, before the Supreme 
Court, 327; favors nomination of 
Chase in 1868, 367. 

Van Buren, John, acts as Chase's 
agent in 1868, 367. 

Van Buren, Martin, low opinion re- 
garding, held by Chase in 1829, 9 ; 
opposed by Chase in 1840, 87 ; leads 
bolt of Barnburners, 96 ; his name 
presented to Buffalo convention by 



464 



INDEX 



Butler, 100; nominated for Presi- 
dent, 101 ; his vote in 1848, 102. 
Van Zandt, John, keeps station of 
Underground Railroad, 75 ; sued 
for aiding runaway slaves, 76; de- 
fended by Chase and others, but 
convicted, 76. 

Wade, Benjamin F., begins public 
career as anti-slavery state senator, 
84 ; elected to United States Senate, 
113 ; a rival of Chase, 114 ; supports 
Homestead Bill, 117 ; not fitted to 
lead anti-slavery men in Senate, 119, 
148 ; attacks Nebraska Bill, 145 ; 
comments on its passage, 146 ; pre- 
vents Chase from receiving whole 
support of Ohio in Republican con- 
vention, 189; fears of Chase's friends 
that he may sweep convention, 193, 
194 ; leads radicals in Senate, 234 ; 
effort of Chase to placate, 309. 

Wade, Edward, signs Appeal of Inde- 
pendent Democrats, 138. 

Walker, I. P., in Nebraska debate, 
145. 

Walker, Robert J., the last efficient 
Secretary of the Treasury before 
Chase, 216; brings suit of Mississippi 
v. Johnson, 348. 

Walker, Timothy, law partner of 
Chase, 22. 

Walley, Samuel H., favors creation of 
national banks, 278. 

War of Rebellion, begun, 211 ; call for 
volunteers, 211, 212; early share of 
Chase in organizing army, 212-217 ; 
the blockade, 226 ; attempts to pre- 
vent internal trade, 226-229; at- 
tempts of Chase to suggest move- 
ments in, 294-297. 

Warden, Robert B., named by Chase 
to be his biographer, 414, 424. 

Washington, Daniel, fugitive slave of 
Amos Kendall, 81. 

Washington, George, unable to re- 
cover a fugitive slave in 1796, 33. 

Washington, social life in, 7-9. 

Watrous, Charles, delegate to Repub- 
lican convention of 1860, 188. 

Watson, Samuel, fugitive slave de- 
fended by Chase, 80. 

Wayne, Judge James M., his death, 



325 ; supposed to have the deciding 
voice in the Supreme Court, 354. 

Webster, Daniel, anecdote of, by 
Chase, 8 ; his legal power described 
by Chase, 10 ; indignation of Chase 
at his Seventh of March speech, 
124 ; his arguments assailed by 
Chase, 127 ; influenced by business 
men, 129 ; compared to Chase, 415. 

Weed, Thurlow, Seward's manager in 
politics, 125 ; influences Republican 
party policy, 177 ; his corrupt man- 
agement in New York, 184-187 ; fa- 
vors compromise in 1860, 201 ; en- 
raged at Lincoln's giving Chase the 
Treasury Department, 205; joins 
with Greeley to recommend a man 
for office, 219 ; sounds Chase on his 
attitude toward Seward, 302. 

Weld, Theodore D., abolitionist in- 
structor in Lane Seminary, 39 ; lec- 
tures at Oberlin, 42 ; aids in forming 
Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, 44. 

Welles, Gideon, on Chase's aversion 
to the name abolitionist, 55; urges 
relief of Fort Sumter, 210. 

Wells, Horace, law partner of Chase, 
23. 

Welsh, William, opposes issue of legal 
tender, 251. 

Western Reserve becomes strongly 
anti-slavery, 43. 

Western Reserve College, early anti- 
slavery centre, 42, 43. 

Whig party elects Harrison, 86, 87 ; 
reasons for Chase's abandonment 
of, 87-90 ; distrusted and hated by 
Chase, 90 ; loses Liberty votes and 
is defeated in 1844, 93 ; reasons why 
attacked by Liberty party, 94 ; nomi- 
nates Taylor, 96 ; in Ohio senatorial 
election, 104-112 ; votes against re- 
peal of Black Laws, 107 ; votes against 
Chase, and refuses to vote for Gid- 
dings, 108, 109 ; defeated in presi- 
dential election of 1852, 132 ; its dis- 
solution foreseen, 132, 149; members 
of, in Ohio nominate a ticket in 
1855, 155. 

Wilraot, David, in House in 1849, 114. 

Wilson, Henry, a Know-Nothing, 176. 

Wirt, William, receives Chase in his 
law office, 7, 11. 



INDEX 



465 



Wise, Henry A., threatens, as gover- 
nor of Virginia, to pursue John 
Brown raiders into Ohio, 175. 

Wood, General Thomas J., corresponds 
with Chase, 215. 

Wright, Elizur, anti-slavery professor 



at Western Reserve College, 43 ; 
praises Lincoln's inaugural address, 
207 ; suggests arming the negroes, 
261. 
Wright, John C, suggested as possible 
Liberty candidate, 95. 



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